Work smarter, not harder

and improve productivity in the factories of the future.
In the last few years, many companies have been designing and deploying advanced control and measurement applications that leverage the benefits of the industrial internet.

These companies are meeting the needs of increasingly complex applications by interfacing with the ‘real world' through a wide range of sensors and actuator technologies, running advanced algorithms on both processors and FPGAs, and then coordinating these systems with other systems – all of which need to be maintained, managed and synchronised globally. These are the systems that make up the industrial ‘Internet of Things' (IoT).

One area where aerospace companies are looking to make huge leaps forward is in machine control and the rise of ‘Smart machines'. For instance, ‘Factory of the Future' at Airbus is an incremental long-term research and technology project that is critical to the company's competitiveness in manufacturing processes. Adding intelligence to the tools and shopfloor systems will help the company to simplify the production process and provide better efficiency for the production process by managing and checking the tasks the operator is completing.

Typically, aircraft production requires the assembly of large and heavy components with quality assurance and full traceability running throughout all the production processes. However, most of these processes are manually intensive. The future of the aircraft factory is a research and technology project aimed to push emerging technologies to improve the competitiveness of Airbus manufacturing processes where manual operations are still predominant today.

A new industrial revolution

Ask any scientist or engineer about the most exciting advances in the world today and they'll become misty-eyed and very animated about Industry 4.0, IoT and Smart factories. But while they all have huge potential to change the way we live and work, before they can truly fulfil that potential, one leading protagonist, National Instruments' (NI) says its challenge is to build a set of tools that will make them possible.

As a supplier of test measurement and control systems also for the aerospace and defence sectors, NI's solutions range from ‘hardware in the loop' simulations to mixed signals, electronic test and the offer of both hardware and software tools that users can combine to realise cutting edge applications that comprise avionics, structural test and monitoring.

Central to the notion of all these applications is a platform-based approach that NI terms ‘graphical system design'. Using this concept, aerospace engineers can scale from design to test, and from small to large systems using tools and intellectual property whilst leveraging commercially available technologies. NI's LabVIEW system design software, used in tandem with its modular, reconfigurable CompactRIO and its modular CompactDAQ hardware is said to simplify the ever-increasing complexity of systems at multiple levels. It abstracts on a high level, enabling the user to focus on their applications without getting too fixated on the details of design implementation.

Hosting what could be called an ‘engineering-based Woodstock', NI's annual NIWeek conference acts as a touchstone for its community of design engineers and scientists, and it's where the concepts of NI's philosophies all come together. Its recent NIWeek was used to introduce LabVIEW 2014 and an Intel Atom processor-based CompactRIO controller fully supported by a Linux-based operating system (NI Linux Real-Time) and which can be programmed through LabVIEW.

“It was very important to look at future trends during NIWeek,” begins National Instruments' technical & marketing director in Europe, Rahman Jamal. “The industry is gradually moving towards new areas like the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and Cyber-Physical Systems. Cyber-Physical Systems may sound abstract, but it's actually easy to understand. ‘Cyber' refers to the Internet of Things. ‘Physical' is the connection to the I/O level and its link to the real world, and ‘Systems' refers to software-centric embedded-type systems. If you take the term and replace CPS through interconnected physical systems, it becomes easily understandable and no longer appears abstract.”

Jamal acknowledges that there is some overlap across the areas of science and engineering, leading to some confusion around what is meant by CPS and how it relates to Industry 4.0, for example. These two terms have become confused with one another. “Using water as the analogy, CPS can be seen as the ocean and Industry 4.0 as one possible wave on this ocean,” he clarifies.

For the aerospace industry, one shining benefit of CPS is as an enabler of machine-to-machine communication in an automated fashion, and with the intention of it leading to increased vertical and horizontal productivity gains.

Cyber-physical systems and Big Analog Data enable a smarter, operator-centric production that allows operators and machines to collaborate in the same physical environment. The ‘Factory of the Future' also implies the extensive use of a modular platform with a high level of abstraction based on commercial off-the-shelf modules.

“Developing an aircraft involves tens of thousands of steps that operators must follow with many checks in place to ensure quality. By adding intelligence to the system, the smart tools understand the actions that the operator must perform next and automatically adjust the tools to the proper settings, which simplify the task for the operator. Once the action is completed, the smart tools can also monitor and log the results of the action, which improves the efficiency of the production process. For example, a given subassembly of an aircraft has roughly 400,000 points that need to be tightened down, which requires over 1,100 basic tightening tools in the current production process. You can imagine that with this many production steps, logging this amount of quality and technical related data can become a huge task.”

Tools that talk

Airbus decided to create ‘Smart tools' that are designed to communicate with a main infrastructure or locally with operators or other tools to provide situational awareness and make real-time decisions based on local and distributed intelligence in the network. The company tested the NI systems on modules (SOM) as the foundation platform for all of these smart tools because of the ubiquitous architecture and framework that it provides to accelerate the development process from design to prototyping to deployment. Having evaluated several SOMs and embedded single-board computers (SBCs), Airbus estimates that its time to deliver with the NI SOM is a tenth of the time using alternative approaches.

“The whole idea of CPS is to automate the production process and make it as seamless as possible with the expectation that it will be much quicker at building for instance aircraft than in the past. The Airbus project demonstrates the potential of a Smart Factory in a more aerospace-related context, and conveys the idea of what you can achieve using a reconfigurable, software-driven platform that can adapt to changing requirements.”

Jamal concludes by adding that NI has introduced the CompactRIO software-designed performance controller, which integrates the latest embedded technologies from Intel and Xilinx to deliver unparalleled performance and flexibility, and is fully supported by LabVIEW 2014 and NI Linux Real-Time and which offers the kind of ‘openness' that is unique in the industrial automation space.

“We decided to select a Linux-based real-time operating system core on our CompactRIO platform to open it up on this level. This helps ensure our efforts around CPS in the spirit of complete openness. With this kind of CompactRIO controller, customers now have access to an open, feature rich and deterministic operating system that allows them to integrate a wealth of third party components. Overall our software-centric eco-system helps our 35,000 worldwide customers to create their own applications and tools.”

www.ni.com