The manufacturing industry is on the cusp of a revolution, where investment is led by software rather than hardware. That in turn enables a raft of new possibilities in creating the factory of the future, according to experts from Audi, ABB and Cosmo Tech.
Automotive manufacturing has experienced a number of technological sea changes over the past decades: the move from relay panels to PLCs (programmable logic controller), from ‘dumb’ buttons to HMIs for communicating with machines, and the widespread introduction of robots. Experts at last week’s AMS Livestream agreed that the next revolution will be software-defined functions.
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“[We will be] thinking of functionalities as software building blocks, instead of buying a piece of hardware that supplies us with a certain functionality,” said Dr Henning Löser, head of Audi’s Production Lab. “We’re now moving down the same route that we did with data centres, and this is going to revolutionise automation.”
He added that there is some reluctance for a change like this, but that it would enable an exponential acceleration in Industry 4.0, because software is much easier to change and maintain than hardware is.
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