Yea, it will take a couple decades for it to be in full swing, and yes we are going to have a lot of issues because the people with the technical knowledge to securely design and configure these devices don't generally want to be on the plant floor, and the guys with the smarts to do it that are willing to get dirty don't generally have an in-depth knowledge of network security and it isn't given as training. There are some gaps to be filled for sure.
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.
Many can't explain what the core definition means... Me neither.
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.
He was talking about industry 4.0 that it's basically means connecting data where each machine can be connected to anything in the company.
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.
He said he programs in Simulink and that this is the future. Programming if then else syntax will be the past. Graphic programmation the future.
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.
So the question is simple... Should I prepare for a job change ?
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.
A lot of process integrators still are in simatic because of their standards... Are they way behind then?
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.