The industry evolves every day but industrialists advance at different speeds. While some use industrial PCs equipped with the famous DOS or Windows 3.1 operating system, others try their hand at IoT technologies (Connected Objects) or even artificial intelligence (Machine Learning or Deep Learning).Many “old” technologies still widely used today prove their stability and efficiency every day. New technologies meanwhile bring a breath of fresh air , new ideas and new ways of consuming data.
The 4th industrial revolution is mainly introduced by the desire to “produce better” and “produce smarter”. This is why we talk particularly about.
We invite you below to discover the technologies that have enabled the emergence of Industry 4.0, the solutions that contribute to the daily improvement of industrial processes and the technologies of tomorrow that will play a revolutionary role in industry.
Web and mobile technologies
The Internet dates from the late 1960s, early 1970s. While initially there were very few network interconnections and this technology was particularly reserved for the army and researchers, today the face of the Internet has changed a lot. In addition to the democratisation of Internet access, the uses of Web technologies have evolved. For example, around the world, Internet sites and applications are now (since 2016) mainly consumed using a smartphone rather than a PC or MAC.Nowadays the Internet plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives.
While it is essential in our homes, for several years now the web has also become essential in our businesses. In fact, Web technologies provide flexibility in exchanges with employees and all of the company’s players. They have brought new possibilities in the exchange of data between the various computerised systems . It is in this context that these developments open up new fields of possibilities for the industry.Computer systems in factories were until recently “locked in” on themselves for various reasons: internal will, technical possibility of interconnection too expensive or impossible, …
The evolution and the continuous deployment of the Web and its technologies has changed a lot. gives it.Today the heart of the evolution of the Internet in the industrial world is based on the interconnection of systems in order to offer data transfers and more intelligent and ever faster processing to meet the growing agility needs of the industry.
The IoT (Internet of Things) is one of the examples of innovations made possible thanks to developments in Web technologies and techniques.
IoT
The technologies associated with this concept make it possible to collect data from machines at the heart of the factory or decentralised and feed them back into the information system.The objective of smart manufacturing is to propose to produce better, more efficiently and more intelligently. To do this, it is necessary to have at all times the general state of all the production systems in order to react intelligently to the various events that may occur. The IoT also works in the other direction and makes it possible to send orders or decisions directly to the machines.
Today there are many hardware or software solutions around IoT issues. It is now, for example, quite possible to transform one or more sensors into IoT using intelligent acquisition modules adapted to the different communication protocols associated with this technology.To learn more, we have already discussed the IoT (Internet of Things) in a previous article , its central role in smart manufacturing and the digitalization of the industry.The volume of data now being uploaded thanks to the IoT is such that traditional IT infrastructures no longer allow the data to be stored or processed efficiently. The Cloud and Big Data are answers to these problems.
Cloud
The cloud is made up of many technologies that make it possible to exploit the computing and storage power of remote computer servers. So instead of having IT infrastructure locally, the cloud makes it possible to relocate all or part of it. Often the rationalisation of costs and consumption-based billing are much more advantageous than owning and maintaining your equipment in-house.
In industry the cloud has opened up new opportunities:
The transfer of data from the various production points to a centralised node
The processing of a large amount of information at a lower cost. (Indeed, the greater the volume of data, the greater the computing power required. The cloud makes it possible to rent this power)Storage of large volumes of data Today the cloud is much more than renting “machine power”. Recent innovations in this area allow major players such as Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud Platform) or Microsoft
(Azure) to offer additional services such as:
Data storage optimised for IoT (Example AWS IoT or Azure IoT Hub)
Tailor-made business services available
Location “d’intelligence » pour le Deep Learning ou Machine Learning databases
…The cloud blends perfectly with the new needs and constraints brought about by industry 4.0 and makes it possible to support changes in the information system with an investment adapted to the needs. The cloud provides a relevant response to the storage and processing constraints of gigantic volumes of data, in particular using Big Data.
