Industry 4.0 and the programmer of today...

But... there is no way in hell I would send this data to some company's servers so I could get a report that may or may not paint the real picture of what is happening.

Anyone heard of the Equifax hack?
If they can't protect their data, how can we expect manufacturers to protect theirs; or their control network?


Off topic, yes, but in response to a claim that is not true, that TPS is accepted by all. Not by me. I resent being forced to participate in an expensive and useless automotive accessory.

Not that far off topic, because the Automation vendors want the same thing. They want THE cloud, IoT, Industry 4.0, stuff that you can only get from them. They do not want open standards. No.

You have to invest completely in one vendor's PLC, motion, IoT, Cloud, MES ...whatever; you need it all to get the value.
 
As mentioned before, the bottom line here is that we have or, with the addition of sensors and some computation can aquire all of the data we need from our PLC's. It is already there. (I'm not really delving into DCS at the moment). If we are collection production data from our machine, there is a large chance it has an HMI. If it has an HMI the PLC to PC integration is done. It isn't very difficult from that point to get the data to a database and then manipulate it however we see fit.

As far as control security, I would LOVE to do that kind of work. I would have no problem getting down and dirty, or even attempting to social engineer my way into a facility. I think breaking into systems for a living would be the most fun EVER.
 
Vision

Hello,

So basically Industry 4.0 is a vision of a very digital world, more than today, invented by some German guys to create some automation industry s.e.x. appeal. like IoT in the US. Maybe we are allready a big step into 4.0, but it's just a way to create more hype for some new tools on the market that maybe make data handling a little more transaparent. At this moment I have a project with OPC UA in a TIA Portal PLC. The goal is that every unit in our machine knows what is the following product that it will need to handle. ERP sends its orders directly via OPC UA into a DB table in the PLC so that we know what the ordered products are and every unit adapts by the products in the Fifo. Nothing really new here, except the OPC UA maybe that makes it able to connect very open to de TIA PLC, because the 1500 CPU's can be OPC UA server by just a simple check mark. Is this Industry 4.0 ? Well I guess so... but nothing really fancy here, except that we don't have any special drivers. :sleep:

The thing is that indeed, like I have red here, Siemens, Kuka (especially kuka), Wonderware, etc... are really using Industry 4.0 a lot for posts on LinkedIn. It's allmost like... if they don't mention 4.0, that they think their post isn't strong enough. It must be mentioned by them. Still I do not really understand this :). So I have also an Automation company, should I post also such Industry 4.0 posts or is this just bulll ? :confused:

About the coding thing and graphically, well... Siemens S5 from the 80's is also graphically in some way 🍻
But today, 2017, a little object oriënted thinking is not bad. Sure I still program SCL, LAD and GRAPH, but when writing SCL I make object blocks. A valve has a FC, a Servo drive has a FC, a sensor has a FC, all have a UDT in a global DB Valves, global DB Drives and so on. The UDT is directly connected to faceplates in WinCC Comf./Adv., so yes, if you make your own standards, you can make a lot of programming graphically. But, this is not new, this is just a way of making standards.

About the data, I work on a consultancy basis in the automobile and in a company where I work a lot I manage 3 servers. 2 Scada servers and 1 Reporting server. On the reporting server I run a Proficy Historian and a SQL Server. On the Scada servers I have also SQL Servers. I run SSRS for reports all demanded via stored procedures that run via linked server to the proficy historian and to the standard SQL Servers. Okay, these Scada systems show the complete workflow + have product counters and OEE all over the place. The reports make anything possible. There are reports for downtime, production, custom reports for analytics, etc etc... long story... but... Industry 4.0... more data ??? Okay maybe easier to get, but more is not allways better, it depneds what you will do with it I think...

So basically, I think we are allready Industry 4.0. Innovation in the future... offcourse, but nothing faster then the way it went the last decades I think. Was there also a hype after the so called Industry 2.0 ? :D

I think I will take a visit to some Automation fair, I'm very curieus. Last time I went was 2 years ago and I remember that I was dissapointed, I think I even said things are a little status quo the last years. But now I'm expecting the Tesla of products in Automation as I can see Industry 4.0 all over the place... o_O

Kind regards,
Gerry


It's funny you should say that. I have a buddy that works for a Security audit company (penetration testing and defense), and he was saying that his firm saw huge growth potential in getting contracts from industrial facilities. However, the few contracts the firm had gotten so far went... ok, but none of the IT types in the group wanted to be the one who went to the facilities, and none of them really knew the lingo of the ICS that was a big part of what they were supposed to be testing.

I'm thinking in the next couple years, there will be a lot of opportunities for IT savvy controls guys.



Mostly it's a bunch of buzzwords. Some of the stuff we've been doing for years, some of it actually represents new tech, and some of it is optimism about products that might be available in 5 years. Every company is talking about the section of Industry 4.0 that benefits them. Some companies want to sell more expensive sensors, NOW WITH ETHERNET(tm). Some companies want to help you sort through your data, NOW ON THE CLOUD (tm). I don't see too much truly revolutionary, it's mostly new ways of doing the same old stuff.



Big picture, sure, that's what people say. Big picture, we aren't that far from that using the technology of last decade (or at least the beginning of this one). The PLC already has the info from all its devices, and can send it where ever it is needed. 90% of the time, you don't want your machine network connected to the larger plant as a whole. So many things can go wrong, the simplest being repeated IP addresses.

The fact of the matter is that Ethernet ports aren't cheap. As Peter N said, Ethernet stacks aren't cheap either (licensing, engineering time, device capabilities). It just isn't realistic to see Ethernet ports on a cheap sensor.



Simulink is a useful tool for prototyping. It also can be useful for modeling and controlling really complex loops (when a PID just can't cut it). I think there are now a few PLC vendors that can link Simulink to the PLC in some way or another. I don't see anyone suggesting the main machine control would be switched over, even in those materials it's just the control loops.

As others have said, graphical programming is already here. We've been using LAD to dumb things down (read: "make programming accessable to electricians) pretty much from the beginning of PLCs. To me, the trend is in the other direction. More and more of the advanced text based programming features from PC based langauges are entering PLCs. The latest IEC 61131 update had a bunch of Object Oriented Programming stuff.



I don't think anything above (or that you mentioned) should be a red flag to you. It's mostly new tools in your toolbox. However, there ARE some trends in the whole Industry 4.0 thing that you may need to be aware of, in terms of jobs in the industry.

One of the big pushes that I see is to automate away a lot of the programming, or at least the grunt work. Now, many of us have been doing this for years. I've seen AB programmers with excel sheets that build up tags or code to be imported back in. Siemens has for years had an API for Simatic Manager that allows external programs to make changes to a project, and something similar is being included in Portal.

However, more and more tools are becoming available to make this easy, and there is more and more integration between packages. I've seen demos where electrical CAD software can export into PLC software, automatically creating the HW setup/properties and IO tags. I've seen demos where robot simulations get downloaded directly into robots, bypassing most of the robot programming. I've seen software to automatically generate HMI objects based on PLC code (and I think this is common in the DCS world).

None of that is worrying for an experienced programmer, because you still need to guy who can troubleshoot, you still need the guy to write the templates or set up the simulation. However, a lot of the entry level/intern/apprentice stuff (hey, Jimmy, go get the prints, and assign all 3000 IO tags, I don't want to see you for a while) may be going away. This means it may be harder for new guys to break into the industry.



There are several interesting new technologies/standards released each year. Maybe one or two of them sticks, and we won't know which ones for at least another 5 years, possibly more. The upside is that we are getting far more vendor neutral standards these days, as many new standards are coming from the IT side and have no existing stake in ICS. Downside is still that if a vendor chooses not to buy into a standard, or to do their own thing, then it is the users who suffer.
 
I wonder what the dealer meant by "programming in Simulink". Matlab/Simulink has a tool to export a simulation model as PLC code (Structured Text, I recall), which can run on an Allen-Bradley or Beckhoff PLC. Last I read, it is tightly integrated with Beckhoff TwinCAT so that you can change constants in the model from the PLC code, and thus tie them to an HMI Windows program so an Operator can change the model during the simulation. But this isn't general PLC programming, so I wonder what he was referring to. For graphical PLC programming, there is SFC and CFC, and perhaps even LD could be termed graphical.
 
What's your guys take on OPC UA? I been hearing it for years but haven't yet to see field implementation. The concept seems fine though and I'm wishing for something better than classic OPC. I'm in the middle of troubleshooting an intermitten classic OPC problem and it's frustrating.
 
Microsoft is joining the OPC UA band wagon.
Link

B&R come with both classic and UA but I have not used either yet.
Rockwell is also releasing or has released a sort of “soft plc” that runs windows and Linux. I don’t see any information on their site but that is what our vendor mentioned a few days ago. I want to say it would be in-chassis like a Contrologix rack.
 
I dont like soft PLC and cant see them getting big appeal.

I use object orietated code and faceplates but plantpax is to heavy on screen counts so dont use it but like the concepts

I prefer the enterprise layer to have SAP sat above SQL/historian/SSRS sat above InBatch or other scheduling, sat above the PLC, The PLC can control the process/hold the phase etc even if the higher layer 'falls over'

I agree Ethernet is perfect for comms but the plant floor upto the historian layer should be securely firewalled and no way on the internet

The internet of everything is marketing BS
 
No soft PLCs for me! Useless. I see that the IIOT **** talks about predicting failures - bloody magic stuff it it can predict the failure of a prox sensor! Give it to me!
 

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