Abstract:

The Industry 4.0 framework conceives future factories as intelligent environments where machines, sensors and actuators are interconnected to enable collaboration, monitoring and control [1]. It was born as an initiative of the German government [2] but it is the term commonly used to refer to the next generation of industrial infrastructures. The contents and skills provided to engineering students must encompass the challenging growth of the technological advancement. Therefore, higher education has to adapt and evolve towards this merging concept in order to provide students with the ability to manage them for efficient future professional careers. As pointed out in [3], only qualified and highly educated employees will be able to control these technologies. Particularly, the Industry 4.0 concept is raising an increasing interest from educators in engineering degrees [4].

To fulfil such a complex scenario, this paper presents the development and educational capabilities of an Industry 4.0-oriented experimental platform. It is focused on automation and supervision tasks managing interoperability and systems integration issues. It includes Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, remote devices and data bases to accommodate the main requirements of that advanced trend.

The goal of the proposed approach is to experimentally illustrate the Industry 4.0 key characteristics. To this aim, not only global concepts are provided to students, but real and specific devices and software packages are used to facilitate their assimilation. Therefore, students are expected to become comfortable with hardware/software tools and communications architectures used in Industry 4.0.

The developed platform is suitable for educational activities in diverse courses mainly related but not limited to automation and control engineering: supervisory systems, PLC programming, sensors and actuators, data acquisition, industrial communications, etc. In addition, a number of specific and transversal skills can be trained by students. The main features of the implemented platform are described as well as its powerful educational applications.

References:
[1] M. Iglesias-Urkia, A. Orive, M. Barcelo, A. Moran, J. Bilbao, A. Urbieta, “Towards a lightweight protocol for Industry 4.0: An implementation based benchmark,” IEEE International Workshop of Electronics, Control, Measurement, Signals and their Application to Mechatronics, San Sebastian, Spain, 24-26 May 2017.
[2] http://www.plattform-i40.de/I40/Navigation/EN/Home/home.html
[3] A. Benešová, J. Tupa. Requirements for Education and Qualification of People in Industry 4.0. Procedia Manufacturing, vol. 11, pp. 2195-2202, 2017.
[4] S. Simons, P. Abé, S. Neser, “Learning in the AutFab – the fully automated Industrie 4.0 learning factory of the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt,” Procedia Manufacturing, vol. 9, pp. 81-88, 2017.

Keywords:

Industry 4.0, automation, supervision, laboratory.