IoT – an important part of Industry 4.0
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When commercials promoted „smart” homes – security, heating, lightening systems or white appliances and media devices e.g. communicating via the internet with suppliers’ machines or individuals like emergency services, „smart” industry, a synonym for industry 4.0, had already started, too. The IoT is one of the major factors in new communicative and interactive developments.
There would be no Industry 4.0 without the Internet of Things. Its implementation of „smart” technology is the basis for new industrial developments and self-governing devices, connecting products, machines and people and the use of new production technology. This could be seen in the independent communication between machines (M2M) when some robot/ machine for example moves a piece of metal on a conveyor belt past a milling machine and “signals” to it how to grind it or where to best pick it up. In such way, it has sensing, identification, processing, communication, actuation and networking capabilities and could be used to regulate and monitor the production process overall.
Examples of technologies for the Internet of Things to be presented at one of the European business fairs, Hannover 2020, listed in one of the latest Industriemagazin issues (03/2020) were – inter alia :
- Visualization system based on native web technologies for industrial operation and monitoring – consistently scalable in hardware and software from machine-oriented applications to distributed solutions.
- Plug and play solutions to process data from the field level locally, hybrid or in the cloud – for e.g. optional analyses based on machine learning.
- Electrical solutions for simple motion tasks – as IO-Link and communication into the cloud.
- Software for creating machine learning models in industry.
- and many more.
The IoT is being implemented at this stage where companies expect performance advantages due to e.g. higher speed, heavier load management, securer movement etc. In the end, there might be lower costs, more items produced in the same or even less time.
Industry 4.0 could also speed up the use of technology in education. Many schools/ training providers have already implemented e-learning, m-learning or any blended learning technology system, combining digital content delivery with traditional training material and training activities, as well as with the use of devices like tablets, smart phones, smart boards, online Content/ Learning Management Systems, cloud based training sources like Massive Open Online Courses – MOOCs etc..
The magazin „Personal manager” (02/2020) postulates that work 4.0 merges with further education 4.0 when „Learning from work for work will in the future lead to a gradual dissolution of any boundaries between work and the learning environment. Learning mostly will take place informally at the workplace, alone or together with other employees or even business partners. Presence seminars will continue to exist, for specialist and/or methodological knowledge – the digital world offers audiovisual media and platforms which can be started quickly, are available almost everywhere and at the same time often already contain playful elements.” And this becomes even more visual, when thinking of the tools which can support in this sense – from the ones commonly aware to be implemented into the training/ learning support like computers, tablets, smart phones many people have, – also to digital watches, wearables (garments which include digital chips and/ or IoT sensors or other intelligent item) to machines at work with IoT sensors for example.
