The new paradigm of industry 4.0

The objective of Industry 4.0 is to enhance businesses' competitiveness through the development of digital solutions that facilitate production planning, predictive capabilities, increased productivity, decreased time to market and consumption, and the emergence of new sustainable and as-a-service business models.
 
The impact of digital technologies is anticipated to be profound across four areas of development. The first area involves utilizing data through the power of computing and connectivity with Big Data, Open Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine, and Cloud Computing. The second area is focused on analytics, which involves extracting value from collected data through machine learning. The third area pertains to human-machine interaction, including touch interfaces and augmented reality (AR). The fourth area concerns the transition from digital to physical realms, which includes additive manufacturing, 3D printing, robotics, communications, the interaction between machines, and new technologies for targeted energy storage and usage, cost rationalization, and performance optimization.
 
The impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the labor market
The 2016 World Economic Forum study, "The Future of Jobs," indicates that demographic and technological factors will have a significant impact on the labor market in the coming years. Certain factors, such as cloud technology and work flexibilization, are already influencing the dynamics of the industry and will continue to do so in the next 2-3 years. While two million new job openings will be created because of this evolution, seven million jobs will disappear, resulting in a net negative balance of over five million jobs.
At the occupational level, the losses will be concentrated in the administrative and production sectors: 4.8 and 1.6 million jobs will be destroyed, respectively. According to the study, finance, management, IT, and engineering will partially offset these losses.
 
Digital twin as a paradigm of the new Industry 4.0
A digital twin refers to a virtual duplicate of physical, hypothetical, and factual resources related to objects, processes, individuals, locations, infrastructure, systems, and devices. Today the technology is mature to create a fully automated factory or a “light-off factory.” To accomplish this goal, the concept is to design the factory in digital twin logic that enables a virtual representation to simulate the layout concerning machines and processes. Once the prototype is finalized, the factory model can be exported and replicated in other regions of the world where the company has its own production sites
 
The factory is no longer a protected area
In the first half of 2022, the laboratories of the US multinational Fortinet reported more than 430 thousand cyberattacks on manufacturing companies, highlighting the importance of monitoring industrial IoT traffic by analyzing all data transmission protocols. To eliminate the risk of gateways/routers becoming a gateway for an attack, cybersecurity devices are regularly updated with software patches. Since 1998, Stormshield, an Airbus Group company, has been working on cybersecurity and identifying effective tools to minimize or evade cyberattacks. In the OT network, the first item is the security gateway, complemented by an "Incident Response" service that enables real analysis of the attack and proposes procedures for recovery. In recent years, Rockwell, a US-based automation and information technology firm, has consolidated its cybersecurity offerings with end-to-end industrial security solutions and services fully integrated into all manufacturing processes, beginning with threat detection and extending to cybersecurity incident response and resolution.
Increasingly, companies are focusing on monitoring and data collection. Based on the assumption that data collected in operations or production lines must increasingly be used by a wider range of stakeholders, they propose a synergy between operations, production processes, data analysis, monitoring and process control as an overall activity.
A lot of companies around the world started offering products and solutions that meet the demands of the new IT era and provide building blocks for creating monitoring solutions based on the networking logic of the Industrial IoT.
 
Did you like this article? Follow us for more contents.