INDUSTRY 4.0
Building a
twin
Greg Blackman explores the efforts underway to improve connectivity in factories
G
ermany’s mechanical engineering, electrical and digital industry associations, the VDMA, ZVEI,
and Bitkom, along with 20 partner companies, formed the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) in September. Te aim is to advance Industry 4.0 through the development of an open source ‘digital twin’, which will function as an interface between physical industrial products and the digital aspects of Industry 4.0 applications. Te fourth industrial revolution, smart
manufacturing, the Industrial Internet of Tings, are all terms for the push to use digital technologies and connectivity to a much greater extent inside and between factories. Te IDTA plans to combine the various parallel development strategies – work in vision, robotics and other domains – in Industry 4.0 into one globally viable open source solution. Along with the VDMA, ZVEI, and Bitkom,
Pepperl+Fuchs, Bosch, SAP, Siemens and Volkswagen are among the founding companies. Dr Matthias Bölke, from
24 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020
Schneider Electric, was elected chairman, and Dr Horst Heinol-Heikkinen, CEO of vision firm Asentics, deputy chairman. ‘Te IDTA was founded to work on
achieving interoperability between machines on a common platform,’ Heinol- Heikkinen told Imaging and Machine Vision Europe. ‘We’re approaching this from the top down, with the platform itself rather than the individual pieces of equipment. We’re creating interoperable digital twins of a vision system or a robot, and understanding how those two pieces of equipment behave and interact on the common digital platform.’ He said that some larger companies are
working independently on improving how machines talk to each other inside their factories, but that, in the majority of cases, Industry 4.0 is in its infancy. Heinol-Heikkinen is also chairman
of the VDMA OPC Vision group, a joint standardisation initiative led by the VDMA and the OPC Foundation that aims to include machine vision in the industrial
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