Industry 4.0 factories are intelligent, highly efficient and adaptive. They are integrated along the value chain and even interconnected beyond company boarders. By that, single individually customized items can be produced economically.
Industry 4.0 characteristics are:
- Horizontal integration all over the value chain
- Vertical integration and interconnected production facilities
- Digital consistent integration in engineering
The corresponding automation technology is based on CPS (cyber-physical-systems) and the IoT (Internet-of-Things). Several challenges need to be addressed.
Equipment, storage systems and devices shall be come intelligent as CPS and shall be interconnected to each other
- These CPS shall autonomously exchange information and control each other
- Consistent data transparency shall be ensured to facilitate optimal decision-making
- Engineering must be consistent and dynamic; production shall be quickly adaptable and flexible
nxtControl has the requested automation technology for industry 4.0 in hand. The automation software offers a solution for the challenges of modern production facilities. Industry 4.0 is grounded in the DNA of nxtControl.
- Easily distributed intelligence respectively control logic based on a standardised technology, the IEC 61499 for distributed control systems
- A hardware abstraction layer separates the application software from the hardware to get the flexibility needed. The life-cycles of software and hardware are optimized
- The most efficient engineering for distributed and integrative facilities and systems with path-breaking usability and functions to master the increasing complexity
- An object oriented engineering with software objects representing real devices including all their aspects. The CPS implementation in nxtControl software.
- The seamless integration from field to cloud level provides more and better data. Full transparency to facilitate better decisions making.