EXHIBITION PREVIEW EMO 2019 HANOVER, GERMANY, 16-21 SEPTEMBER – WWW.EMO-HANNOVER.DE
and others, if they want to boost their
business with manufacturers of production
technology.”
In the ‘Industry 4.0 area – smart
solutions for your business’ section,
innovative companies and research
institutes will present intelligent solutions.
These will include intelligent components
for process monitoring or operator support,
solutions that ensure smooth data ow with
maximum data security, and more. This
special show will also present the current
state of scienti c development.
The ‘Industry 4.0 Trend Forum’ sees the
VDW join forces with the software
association of the VDMA (German
Engineering Federation) to organise a high
calibre forum on the latest Industry 4.0 and
machine learning trends, including
presentations and panel discussions that
will run throughout the EMO exhibition.
But a connected world requires standard
interfaces and a standard data format (or a
mapping capability). The development of
such a standard has been driven by the
VDW, together with eight well-known
German machine tool manufacturers and all
major control suppliers. Called ‘umati’
(universal machine tool interface), it is
based on the OPC UA standard and
provides neutral and open connection of
machines to higher level IT systems,
allowing data from different machine
manufacturers using different control
systems be transferred to ERP and MES
systems or into the cloud. A joint working
group was set up for OPC UA at the end of
2018 and the international machine tool
community is now able to participate in
revising and disseminating the standard.
Umati will be presented in its nal form
at EMO, with the goal being to present a
complete implementation of the
speci cation, together with a larger number
of partners, currently around 50. “The VDW
is assuming that the rst products will also
be offered in which precon gured OPC UA
servers are integrated directly into the
respective control units, based on the
speci cation,” Miller says.
To date, more than 20 umati use cases
have been de ned. These include at-aglance
overview of production, program
progress and machine status, handling of a
production order, creation of error statistics
and operating status in a time stream –
they are described by over 100 relevant
parameters.
Small- and medium-sized companies, in
particular, are counting on being able to
connect their machines effectively in order
to participate in the new IoT developments,
Machine tool design & Industry 4.0:
excerpt taken from an interview with
Berndt and Hubert Heller (past managers
of Gebr. Heller Maschinenfabrik GmbH) –
Hubert Heller: “The fact that it will be
possible to acquire an increasing amount
of data in the future has no impact on the
concept of the machine. And, allow me to
raise the question: what are we going to
do with the masses of data? Who will
process them and who will draw the right
conclusions? What we should ask
ourselves is how great will be the effort
involved and how great the resulting
bene t. Above all, every future machine
concept will be tailored to our customers’
needs. The customer decides what he
wants – no one else.” (Full interview:
https://is.gd/oqucow)
it is suggested. Such standardised plugand
play technology will allow them to
concentrate on their core competences and
not demand they be IT experts – basically,
just like today’s home computing
technology. The individual elements in a
connected chain of manufacturing
technology equipment are today almost
taken as a given – they do what is required,
repeatedly and reliably. It’s increasingly
becoming about exploiting that ‘taken as a
Tool & cutter grinder
expert Walter explains
its technology at 2017’s
edition of EMO
www.machinery.co.uk @MachineryTweets August 2019 17
/WWW.EMO-HANNOVER.DE
/oqucow)
/www.machinery.co.uk