Connect
The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is based on the premise of the interconnected factory. This should enable there to be “higher-level” systems, such as corporate ERPs being able to communicate with production resources in a bidirectional manner.
Companies thus need to be provided with tools that can interconnect, in a simple, effective and intelligent way, any production resource regardless of the communication protocol.
The way in which the various production “bodies” (machinery, lines, measuring systems, testing systems, etc.) communicate are very much mixed, so it is advisable to have a modular approach to connection. Through protocol “adapters”, which speak the language individual entities but exchange standardised information with the rest of the system, it can adapt to numerous situations while leaving the core system, an efficient and consolidated data exchange engine, unchanged.
All data collected should be able to be digitized, analysed by systems and recreated on specific dashboards: in this way, you can monitor real-time processes or perform Data Analytics on data collected over a given period.