Smart factories
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The revolution will be automated
Te digitisation of factory production is changing the way parts are manufactured. Greg Blackman speaks to Professor Detlef Zühlke at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence on what the factories of the future will look like
T
he Siemens electronics plant in Amberg, Germany makes 12 million Simatic programmable logic controllers (PLCs) a
year or around one control unit every second. It is a highly automated factory (relying to some extent on the PLCs it produces) and is an example of Siemens’ Digital Enterprise Platform, an advanced production environment that has many of the hallmarks of what the factories of the future could look like, or what in Germany is referred to as Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution. Whereas the third industrial revolution
is defined by the use of electronics and IT, Industry 4.0 is based on the Internet of Tings (IoT), objects embedded with electronics, soſtware, sensors and connectivity all operating in a networked infrastructure. Te idea is that all aspects of the factory, including in some cases the people working in the plant, are linked in this network, feeding back information about the production process to
4 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • Yearbook 2015/2016
The Siemens electronics plant in Amberg, Germany combines real and virtual worlds. Products communicate with machines, and all production processes are optimally integrated
controlling soſtware and the rest of the factory systems. Over the last 10 years, the technology
initiative SmartFactory KL and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) have been developing an Industry 4.0 demonstrator plant. Te association has 39 members including suppliers like Siemens, SAP, Cisco, Festo and IBM, users like BASF and Continental, and academic partners. Te latest project, the SmartFactory KL 4.0
demonstrator, consists of nine production modules from different manufacturers that are all plug-and-play compatible with each other, so that a factory environment can be set up by bringing these modules together. Professor Detlef Zühlke, director of Innovative Factory Systems at the DFKI and chairman of the board at SmartFactory KL, described it as a bit
Siemens AG
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