Design of integration framework towards industry 4.0: from shop floor to cloud

Abstract

The capability of the fourth industrial revolution in fulfilling the ever-changing demand of customers has attracted great attention from the small medium enterprises. Industry 4.0 is one of the ideal solutions to advance the manufacturing to a new level to tackle the high variation in productions of roofing industry. A three-layer Industry 4.0 integration framework, adoptable by a considered roofing company was proposed in this study. A conceptual mechanical designs of automated stacking systems also have been proposed to automate the considered stacking process in the roofing company to minimize the manual labour workforce. The proposed framework realized the complete integration from field layer to the Cloud system using Automation Markup Language and OPC Unified Architecture technologies as the communication backbone. The feasibility of the proposed framework was demonstrated through experiment conducted on an experimental system model where the Google Cloud, the OPC UA-AutomationML server, and a microcontroller-controlled system was used as the enterprise layer, communication layer, and the field layer, respectively. The success of integration was proven by controlling the light intensity and ON/OFF status of a physical LED through the Cloud. For future works, the proposed framework could be implemented on a simulated model of real-time prototype or a real-time manufacturing line to test its robustness.