Practical Implementation of Industry 4.0 Based on Open Access Tools and Technologies

Abstract

Industry 4.0 provides a major breakthrough for innovating processes in contemporary manufacturing companies, it arises from the simultaneous presence of an opportunity and a necessity. The opportunity is the availability of powerful ICT technologies, that everyone uses every day with smart phones thanks to the well-established and expensive infrastructure provided by tech giants. The necessity is the achievement of Lean transformation in western enterprises through a deep knowledge on manufacturing processes and an incessant training of workforce. Industry 4.0 will provide us with an integrated holistic view of the manufacturing processes and the possibility to control them according to appropriate forecasts and evaluation of performances and results. Industry 4.0 was born in 2011 and it is in its early stage, there are many research gaps which must be studied and large applications that must be fully integrated in the Industry 4.0 framework. In this paper a simple application of Industry 4.0 is presented with the aim of demonstrating that, using commercially available open source components, it is possible to integrate different technologies belonging to industry (robotics) and commercial components into one eco-system. Moreover, it integrates different I4.0 enabling technologies namely: Robotics, IoT and fog/edge computing. Finally, the proposed framework can serve as an educational and practical tool for demonstration of Industry 4.0.