The shape of things to come

With the summer holidays now just a distant memory, everyone is back to work feeling refreshed, reinvigorated and ready to roll and roll.

I celebrated yet another birthday recently, and although I can easily recall things that happened in the dim and distant past, I’m increasingly forgetting what it was I was trying to think of a minute ago.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes. Information pervades our everyday lives, and the internet makes it possible to consume it in vast amounts. It also modifies the way companies in the composites supply chain take on the things they need to know in order to keep pace with technology.

However, the sheer weight of data travelling along the information superhighways of our IT departments and shopfloors makes it difficult to maintain traceability of all our production processes.

Enter Industry 4.0, the latest trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. Comprising cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things and cloud computing, Industry 4.0 is set to create what is being called the ‘Smart factory’ of the future.

Leading companies now deploy advanced control and measurement applications that leverage the benefits of the industrial Internet. Their goal: to increase quality, productivity and traceability - especially important if you consider that manufacturers machine, inspect and collect information on hundreds of thousands of data points throughout the assembly of planes, trains and automobiles.

With major OEMs like Airbus and its ‘Factory of the Future’ concept employing Smart tools that use reconfigurable, software-driven platforms to keep tabs on manually-intensive machining operations, it would seem that the wise are increasingly looking to digitalise and firmly clutch this concept to their virtual bosoms. The fourth industrial revolution has arrived – long live the revolution!

Mike Richardson, editor

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