Bosch Rexroth's Factory of the Future Aims to Improve Production Processes One Application at a Time.

Digitalization is increasingly transforming mechanical engineering and manufacturing technologies, bringing with it not only unparalleled control and flexibility over production systems but so much more.

At the recently concluded Automate 2019 and Promat trade shows (held in Chicago in April), we saw a lot of new technology aimed at making factories more efficient and productive.

Heavy industry. The phrase conjures images of mines and steel mills, of huge caverns underground, of cavern-like factories, of oldline companies operating heavy-duty machines for hightorque work. That's the image of heavy industry. Today, though, there's also another image. It's of an operator walking a steel mill's floor, looking at his smartphone or his tablet.

The theme of this issue is integration. Mechanical components are being developed with embedded sensors. The components are talking to each other, sending information to the cloud and producing terabytes of big data to help manufacturers better understand their processes, predict problems and control costs.

Industrial mainstay adapts to remain relevant in a 4.0 world

For a 5-megawatt wind turbine prototype, aerodyn employs the latest control and software technologies, including a comprehensive PC-based control solution and the new modular TwinCAT Wind Framework. The TwinCAT Wind Framework features the latest software engineering and Big Data applications to extend current Industry 4.0 concepts to the wind energy industry. The modular software supports, for example, the direct provision of sensor data to the operator’s database, and in general enables the easy adaption of the wind turbine operation management to future requirements.

The revolution goes by many names: machine-to-machine communication, smart manufacturing and the Industrial Internet, to name a few. In Europe, the prevailing term is Industry 4.0. In Germany, where that phrase was coined, the government is putting down €200 million to cultivate a lead in the industry. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that its potential economic impact will be almost $4 trillion (or more) by 2025. Enthusiastic evangelists will tell you that the Industrial Internet is the most important advance in their industries that they’ve seen in their decades-long careers.