Architecture for Industry 4.0 - Foundational, Bridge, Transformative

The idea of Industry 4.0 was to have interconnected cyber physical systems, However most of us have reduced it to "Industry 3.0 + Manufacturing data platform" and squeezing it to get value out of our investment.

We need to rethink about how we architect our industry 4.0 solutions. Moving our solution from "industry 3.0 Automation Pyramid based solution for Make" to "highly interconnected Cyber Physical Systems across different phase of supply chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Asset Life Cycle Management" is not going to be easy.

Initially we started with Automation Pyramid mainly for Operation/Make(Industry 3.0). Then we started extending it to optimize our operation & maintenance. Namur published NOA to define Operation and Optimization architecture in a clever way to differentiate. We hear lot about Industrial Data Lake and we started adopting higher level of Analytics with current architecture. In my opinion, all these are Bridge Architecture approach towards Industry 4.0, which does provide relatively quicker ROI, but these are not enough to achieve the promises of industry 4.0.

However, there are several cross industry organisations, which are doing some awesome work to unlock the value of industry 4.0, These will be key components of a true Industry 4.0 Transformative Architecture. As it is getting more clearer on where we want to go, we need to carefully define, readjust, navigate our architecture evolution path.

However, I couldn't find a clear & curated thought about the Smart Manufacturing architecture evolution journey. I would be publishing articles to share my current thoughts about the evolution of different key components in Manufacturing stack and how it would converge over time to achieve truly interconnected cyber physical systems which could enable autonomous operations in future..