Industry 4.0 By Dr. Mark Bohan, Director, Prinect and CtP, Heidelberg, USA


Print manufacturing is embracing Industry 4.0 with the next level of industrial production driven by digitization, having gone through many changes over the past decades. This is driving productivity while ensuring and ver- ifying the quality of the


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WINTER 2017


printed materials in an autonomous and integrated manner. Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revo- lution, with the first revolution based on the har- nessing of power from steam or water, followed by the advent of mass production using electric energy. This was followed by the use of digital technologies using electronics and IT to further automate the production process.


What we are seeing now with the fourth industrial revolution is the use of cyber–physical systems. These are effectively systems and processes which communicate with each other, machine and/or


humans, both inside and outside company bound- aries, collaborating to provide a smart production system throughout the whole value chain. Examples from the printing industry can be seen in Figure 1.


The nine key components that drive Industry 4.0 are as follows:


1. System integration 2. Big data and analytics 3. Simulation and virtualization 4. Industrial internet of things (IoT) 5. The Cloud 6. Cybersecurity 7. Autonomous robots 8. Augmented reality 9. Additive manufacturing


While not all of these may be evident in each case, the manufacturing will leverage many of these key components.


This will have a very significant change in both the way in which businesses operate and also those that will be successful in the future. While efficiencies


1.0 Mechanization, water/steam power


• 1810s onward


• Steam powered newspaper press, cylinder presses, and typesetting machines


2.0 Mass production


• 1880s onward


• Newspapers, electric power for drive shafts, book printers


3.0 Computer and automation


• 1960s onward


• Scanners, direct-to- plate, step-and-repeat machines


Figure 1. The evolution of Industry 4.0 in the print industry.


4.0 Cyber physical systems


• 2000 onward


• Development of auto- mated factories, JDF connectivity, Cloud solutions


TECHNOLOGY


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