How Engineering Fits into Industry 4.0

Reviewed by Allister Steel, Solution Engineer (April 2024)

As Industry 4.0 and the IIoT revolutionise how products are designed and made, engineers will need to continually adapt their skills, knowledge, and practices to fit into this space. This guide will outline the benefits of Industry 4.0 technologies and how engineers can deploy IIoT solutions to achieve competitive designs.

What is Industry 4.0? It is the Fourth Industrial Revolution and all of its game-changing technologies and concepts. The previous three industrial revolutions are broadly considered to be the advents of mechanisation and steam power, electricity and assembly lines, and electronics, computers, and automation.

The fourth one is the rise of industrial applications in our data-driven, highly interconnected world. It is characterised by industrial machines connecting to the internet and each other, allowing rapid execution and optimisation in quality control, supply chain management, maintenance, and automation. Industry 4.0 also deploys cloud computing, AI, machine learning, and robotics to reduce waste and increase energy efficiency to improve operating costs.

Businesses operating in Industry 4.0 have a better understanding of their operations and can more nimbly succeed in this fast-paced revolution.

Industry 4.0 examples are readily familiar to many people: AI, 3D printing, interconnected devices, etc. This is a key factor of this ‘revolution’. Smartphones and other online devices are used throughout our lives, and that absolutely includes engineering and manufacturing.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to industrial devices that can transmit operational information over the Internet. The IIoT is one of the principal Industry 4.0 technologies since it connects industrial machinery to the rest of the company and the broader world. The IIoT allows engineers and businesses to:

• Remotely control operations
• Monitor equipment efficiencies
• Detect issues in their early stages — well before they become costly or disastrous failures
• Know with better certainty the status of their inventory and supply chain
• Understand the business costs of machinery assets

Using IIoT devices also requires engineers to provide systems for managing this data, including through IoT gateways and edge computing devices: data hubs installed close to IIoT devices, allowing collecting, processing, and securing multiple devices’ data before sending it to the cloud, reducing latency.

Additive manufacturing, such as 3D printing, has been revolutionary in its ability to produce products rapidly, minimise waste, and create shapes that would be excessively expensive or even impossible to produce with traditional manufacturing. This unlocks designs and approaches previously out of reach to engineers, making more problems solvable at reasonable costs.

Industries that are reaping great benefits of Industry 4.0 through 3D printing include:

• Healthcare: 3D printing is making medical implants, prosthetics, and even surgical instruments more readily and rapidly available at reasonable costs. There are even innovations in development for 3D printing replica tissue, bone, and organs
• Aerospace: Private space exploration has become possible partly through the use of 3D printing to get aerospace products to market much more quickly. Advances in metal 3D printing technologies are also making complex aluminium and titanium designs buildable at a fraction of their previously expected costs
• Automotive: Automobile manufacturing deploys 3D printing for rapid prototyping and design iterations, custom tools and jigs for assembly lines, more doable lower-volume speciality vehicle productions, and enhanced feature customisation

Computer-based simulations have long been in the engineering toolbelt, and Industry 4.0 technologies are taking these simulations to new levels, such as:

• Virtual and augmented reality allowing easy visualisation of how products will fit into and interact with their environments
• Condition monitoring and predictive maintenance, which uses instrumentation to identify developing problems in machinery and automatically call for addressing them through a computerised maintenance management system (CMMS)
• ‘Digital twin’ as-builts of buildings, enabling monitoring of how well they function compared to their design

Microprocessors continue to get smaller and more powerful, allowing industrial computing to perform staggeringly broad, complex tasks to help businesses identify ways to compete on new levels.

As Industry 4.0 technologies collect and store reams of data, artificial intelligence can sort through it. AI and machine learning can be deployed industrially in the following ways:

• Performing predictive maintenance by monitoring machine vibrations and other conditions to determine when maintenance shutdowns are required
• Quickly visually inspecting products to both reduce manual inspections and detect costly defects more reliably
• Making human-machine interfaces (HMIs) more intuitive, adaptive, and accessible based on the individual user
• Interfacing with manufacturing robotics and improving their output quality and efficiency
• Optimising supply chain management by forecasting demand and managing inventory

Using AI in engineering enables many of the benefits of Industry 4.0, but it must be used carefully, ethically, and responsibly, as with all AI applications.

As engineers rise to overcome Industry 4.0 challenges, they will also come to seize the business benefits of Industry 4.0:

• Abundant data to use in design calculations and decisions
• Easy synchronisation with other teams’ work
• Reduced time for design iterations
• Quicker addressing of customer requests and complaints
• Nonstop professional development
• Increased efficiency
• Enhanced productivity
• Cost reduction
• Quality improvement
• Flexibility and customisation
• Innovation and product development
• Supply chain optimisation
• Safety and compliance
• Sustainability

Along with its various lines of Industry 4.0 technologies, RS can bring the benefits of Industry 4.0 to you through its maintenance solutions and the RS Industria condition-based monitoring platform.