Toward Industry 4.0 With IoT: Optimizing Business Processes in an Evolving Manufacturing Factory

Abstract

Research advances in the last decades have allowed the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) concepts in several industrial application scenarios, leading to the so-called Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT (IIoT). The Industry 4.0 has the ambition to revolutionize industry management and business processes, enhancing the productivity of manufacturing technologies through field data collection and analysis, thus creating real-time digital twins of industrial scenarios. Moreover, it is vital for companies to be as "smart" as possible and to adapt to the varying nature of the digital supply chains. This is possible by leveraging IoT in Industry 4.0 scenarios. In this paper, we describe the renovation process, guided by things2i s.r.l., a cross-disciplinary engineering-economic spin-off company of the University of Parma, which a real manufacturing industry is undergoing over consecutive phases spanning a few years. The first phase concerns the digitalization of the control quality process, specifically related to the company's production lines. The use of paper sheets containing different quality checks has been made smarter through the introduction of a digital, smart, and Web-based application, which is currently supporting operators and quality inspectors working on the supply chain through the use of smart devices. The second phase of the IIoT evolution-currently ongoing concerns both digitalization and optimization of the production planning activity, through an innovative Web-based planning tool. The changes introduced have led to significant advantages and improvement for the manufacturing company, in terms of: (i) impressive cost reduction; (ii) better products quality control; (iii) real-time detection and reaction to supply chain issues; (iv) significant reduction of the time spent in planning activity; and (v) resources employment optimization, thanks to the minimization of unproductive setup times on production lines. These two renovation phases represent a basis for possible future developments, such us the integration of sensor-based data on the operational status of production machines and the currently available warehouse supplies. In conclusion, the Industry 4.0-based ongoing digitization process guided by things2i allows to continuously collect heterogeneous Human-to-Things (H2T) data, which can be used to optimize the partner manufacturing company as a whole entity.

Human Factor in Smart Industry: A Literature Review

“…Within this production the products and all affected systems, as well as all process steps of the engineering, are digitized and interconnected to share and pass information and to distribute this along the vertical and the horizontal value chains, and even beyond that in extensive value networks." A marked change in the industrial sector corresponds to an advanced process of automation and digitization, combining physical and virtual resources and internet (Belli et al, 2019). Smart factory defines a new approach to manufacturing by introducing recent industrial Internet technologies, intelligent sensors, cloud computing, predictive analytics of data and scenarios by Big Data, simulations, and resilient control technologies (Lee, 2015).…”

“…In particular, technologies and core approaches of Industry 4.0 are Physical Cyber Systems (CPSs), Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and software (Jeganathan et al, 2018;Pejic-Bach et al, 2019), virtual reality, augmented reality, simulation (Aromaa et al, 2018), Big Data (Belli et al, 2019;Pejic-Bach et al, 2019), cloud computing (Pejic-Bach et al, 2019) and Cyber security (Carías et al, 2019).…”

Towards Digital Twin Implementation for Assessing Production Line Performance and Balancing

“…Malik and Bilberg [36] presented the DT of a human-robot collaboration work-cell based on event-based simulation that continuously updates the changes of real counterpart, without transferring real kinematic data to the digital human. A detailed description of digitalization processes of factories, according to the Industry 4.0 paradigm, is proposed by Belli et al [37], together with an application developed for monitoring the production and the quality control. Short and Twiddle [38] developed the digitalization of a water industry application, while Li et al [39] developed an AR application for the control and adjustment of robots during a human-robot interaction based working task.…”

Ultrasonic-Based Environmental Perception for Mobile 5G-Oriented XR Applications

“…In recent years, many business models have been radically changed and, in some cases, have even been sparked by the IoT. Illustrative examples include Smart Cities [ 8 ], Smart Agriculture [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ], Industry 4.0, and Industrial IoT (IIoT) [ 13 , 14 ]. Nowadays, thanks to the IoT, the real world is potentially a smart and hyperconnected world.…”