Industry 4.0: A cost and energy efficient micro PLC for smart manufacturing

Abstract

"Smart Factory" is the future of industries. Industry 4.0 is the backbone in realizing this new concept. Industry 4.0 is based on the latest new technologies viz. Internet Of Things (IOT) and Cloud computing. IOT provides the devices which communicate between themselves and with the servers. Machine to machine communication is the base for IOT. Whereas the cloud computing provides us the space to store all the data and the facility to compute without the need of complex hardware thus reducing the cost of IOT devices. It is inventively challenging to construct devices and develop the services to realize the vision of the Fourth generation in Industrial Revolution. But it's more challenging to get the existing Manufacturing setups and the Small scale industries in the realm of the Smart Factories. Thus a small cost effective MicroPLC is proposed which can be used in various configurations to enable the industrialist to enjoy the features of the Smart factories at optimal cost and energy.