Industry 4.0 progress

In an ordi­nary year, PI (Profibus & Profinet Inter­na­tion­al) would already – and once again – have pre­sent­ed its progress on Indus­try 4.0 work at the Hanover Fair – but this is no ordi­nary year. Nev­er­the­less, the work­ing group experts are work­ing tire­less­ly on imple­ment­ing con­cepts like the use of Profinet over TSN, fail-safe machine-to-machine com­mu­ni­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion mod­els for ver­ti­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion – vir­tu­al­ly and at a safe dis­tance, of course.

Obvi­ous­ly, this is not an easy time for an orga­ni­za­tion which has com­mit­ted itself to the net­work­ing of automa­tion sys­tems, and espe­cial­ly also those of tech­ni­cal experts. PI has been part of the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion from the very begin­ning, though, which makes it ide­al­ly equipped for this sit­u­a­tion. This being the case, it is no won­der that the work­ing groups chose to con­tin­ue devel­op­ing their con­cepts. Online meet­ings and process­es have been part of every­day work at PI for many years, enabling effec­tive and easy coop­er­a­tion. To share this progress with Profinet users as well, PI is now imple­ment­ing a num­ber of dif­fer­ent vir­tu­al meth­ods of communication.

The focal point of this com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the PI web­site, www.profibus.com/I40, where “Indus­try 4.0” is being rolled out again in its entire­ty.  PI is focus­ing on the high­lights of its Indus­try 4.0 work here, begin­ning with Profinet over TSN, OPC UA Safe­ty and ver­ti­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Addi­tion­al con­cepts will be addressed and added suc­ces­sive­ly over time. PI won’t just be pro­vid­ing an overview of the tech­nol­o­gy and leav­ing it at that – tech­ni­cal details on solu­tions and use cas­es for appli­ca­tions will be added as well. This gives device man­u­fac­tur­ers and users sol­id infor­ma­tion for their own imple­men­ta­tion of Indus­try 4.0‑compliant integration.

In addi­tion to this dig­i­tal con­tent, PI will also be visu­al­iz­ing the Indus­try 4.0 work­shop to enable dis­cus­sion with users and enter into dia­log in these try­ing times – times which every­one at PI hopes will be over soon. Regard­less, the work­ing groups will con­tin­ue to work hard on imple­ment­ing Indus­try 4.0, in keep­ing with the mot­to: Go dig­i­tal. Go Profinet .