Help With Ideas Industry 4.0

DemetrioUrrea

Member
Join Date
Nov 2021
Location
Maracaibo
Posts
6
Hello Collegues ! I am here today looking for help, i recently started a magister in controls and automation. I was thinking in doing an automated system for a plant for processing residual water, They told me that this is an idea for ingeners not for magister, So they recomend me trying to start with this idea but with Industry 4.0, I already saw a lot of talk about the industry 4.0 but no tools to implement it with The PLC, I recently saw mindsphere and it was what i need, but obviously i cannot pay for the program to apply that. Do you have another idea? at this point i am more lost than other thing and I would be greatful for every message.
 
Industry 4.0 is just a marketing thing about connecting machines with Ethernet to plant wide monitoring systems and even between plants. The term industry 4.0 but what it is trying to achieve is not. Industry 4.0 is just a marketing thing,

Ask what happened to industry 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

Most PLCs can communicate with Ethernet so there is nothing to be done. I doubt you want to connect all the machine centers in a plant with ethernet on your own,
 
I am just trying to take foward my Tesis, Industry 4.0 real or not by definition, have some qualities that i can bring to my Automated System. Maybe an online HMI that i could get access outside plant or something like that. This is not part of my strengths thats why i am here looking ideas. I need to add something to my automated system to be valid as a tesis.
 
Doing a school project on Industry 4.0 is a waste of time. I don't know what a magister is. Is similar to what we call a master's degree? I don't see how an automation degree is useful since automation is really knowing how to control machinery and there are many types of machines. PH control required knowledge of chemistry and how ions associate and disassociate. Temperature control requires knowing how to compensate for dead time. Each application requires knowledge of more than just flipping bits.

Worth while topics of study.
Learning how to do system identification and modeling. Model the systems using differential equations.
Different types of filtering or noise reduction. One can't control what what can't measure. It is often necessary to filter or estimate actual values. This is somewhat related to the previous line.
For motion control a big topic is target generators. There are the simpler one dimensional target generators but robotics require 3 dimensional motion generates. The math is complicated but it is also already done.

Generate all the formulas for calculating controller gains. Include pole AND zero placement.
What can one do with zero and pole placement?
Do this for up to 3rd order systems. SOPDT has been done. Why doesn't one hear of TOPDT plants?

How does one optimize a system that requires cascaded control. When is cascaded control required?

What is input shaping? This is an interesting topic. I got introduced in the early 1990s.

Here is the problem from hell. So far I know of only myself and one other person has be able to solve it. Move from any position, velocity and acceleration to any other position velocity acceleration in the minimum time given a jerk limit. A professor used my problem in a seminar many years ago. His software would solve the problem but not fast enough so it could be used in a motion controller.

Students often have projects where a car needs to follow a line around a track. Although some teams get very good results, the project is much more difficult. It requires using the chain rule because the PID should not be updated as a function of time. These kinds of problems have shown on this forum a few times.

How about optimizing multiple input and multiple output problems.

Model predictive control is also a good topic. The MPC algorithm is probably not as difficult as calculating the model to use. This is related to above suggestion.

Being able to model and optimize things will go a long way. It is way beyond turning things off and on.

This is one of my favorite quotes by a dead white dude.
William Thompson AKA Lord Kelvin said:
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
I really like the idea of modeling and optimizing.
 
If your teachers in control and automation are pushing you towards Industry 4.0, then they've been far removed from industry for too long.

Why would anyone in their right mind give access to a production plant outside of it? What already happens and is not a Industry 4.0 thing is that data from plants is collected and reported on a set frequency and sent by email to the people that need said data. Likewise, no one above operator level cares for the plant's operating point in a given moment in time since there's nothing they can do that the operators shouldn't already be doing from that information. Trending and analysis of data is where the benefit will be and that's where managers and process engineers will focus.

I have this discussion all the time with my indirect boss when he comes and asks me to build mimics of the plant running on our historian... and every time I ask for who he has no answer other than it looks nice.

Peter's advice, mainly around modelling, is gold and pretty much the best thing you can do if you really want to tackle Industry 4.0. Notice that the companies pushing this concept of Industry 4.0 in the end will be selling you data gathering, storage and analysis. Any respectable company will have an historian, you can create the analysis and modelling to predict stuff around the plant and cut out the rent seekers.
 
I think you got us on a bad day, we are normally quite nice people here, full of optimism and hope :)
It is OK to get excited about Industry 4.0, yes a lot of 4.0 was done in 3.0, and probably 2.0, but there is still a lot of new stuff. I think a large portion of the change we will see will be in agriculture, which will have to change as the climate shifts.

Don't worry that English isn't you first language, unfortunately Spanish isn't even my fourth language :)
Have a look on Wikipedia, someone with a warm heart took time to write the page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution#Fourth_Industrial_Revolution
The kind of stuff that excites me is typified by my burglar alarm. It used to just detect burglars and set off an alarm. Now the smart sensors still detect people but also detect room temperature, humidity, light levels and even vibration. The motion detector sees my presence and switches on lights and heating. If it is warmer outside than in then it makes sense to open a window. If it is going dark then curtains should close. If there is vibration it can tell me that I should get under a table because there is an earth quake :). It is a world away from that red light that used to flash as I walked past.
 
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Industry 4.0 is definitely about connecting controllers and HMIs to the enterprise, but there is more. A lot of PLCs and HMIs are already connected to SCADA systems and have been for years. A key point of Industry 4.0 is the addition of sensors that communicate more information than just ON or OFF or a simple analog signal. An example would be a photo switch that not only outputs a digital output, but the health of the sensor and an analog value as well. This info would be transmitted on the network where devices other than the main controller could monitor the sensor for changes in the sensor and process. If the sensor notices that it's light source is failing, it can communicate that change to the controller so a replacement can be planned, rather than reacting when there is an all-out failure. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtualization of the process also have a key place in the definition. People that have been in the industry a while tend to disregard or minimize the trends toward Industry 4.0. People like to talk about what is important to them and disregard trends that they do not understand or don't want to implement. I am one of those who brushed off this trend at first, but it isn't going anywhere. Look at the trends in our "phones". They are more than just phones. In addition to the obvious other functions, they learn our habits, communicate with many different things simultaneously, report their health and our habits to us and the cloud (service providers and manufacturer) and adjust their functions based on our usage. That functionality will be expected in the control systems as well. (It already is in some cases.)
 

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