RMIT University has selected several new technologies as part of its digitalisation initiative to help equip students with Industrie 4.0 skills.
Research and advisory company Gartner says Industrie 4.0 refers to a fourth industrial revolution that encompasses many technologies and business designs, including IoT.
As Industrie 4.0 has continued to expand, demand for graduates with these skills has increased, and over the past year, RMIT had increasingly focused on digital transformation and smart connected products and operations to expand its educational programs and services to industry.
As part of this, the university has chosen PTC’s ThingWorx internet of things platform, Windchill software and ThingWorx Studio technology, and partnered with LEAP Australia, PTC, and ANSYS to help incorporate the technology into courses.
While RMIT has used various disconnected technologies in the past to support IoT and AR teaching and research, the Thingworx technology will provide a purpose-built IoT platform that can create IoT and AR experiences through commercially supported software.
The technology will be used across a range of disciplines, as Industrie 4.0 requires skills from many facets of the university including engineering, manufacturing, computing, business and design.
“An example of this is the advanced manufacturing precinct (AMP), where Industrial IoT will transform the facility to an Industrie 4.0 testbed with the use of live system data monitoring and analytics,” said Mark Raphael, business development manager, School of Engineering at RMIT.
“RMIT is also planning a cloud-hosted AR digital twin of the AMP that can be accessed from any location, as well as using Windchill PLM for managing data within internal and external collaborations across numerous national projects.”
RMIT will also expand its collaboration with local industry partners to help businesses with Industrie 4.0, and said it sees potential in companies using real-time, real-world insights from Industrial IoT data.
This includes partners in fields such as food and agriculture, medical technologies, building construction, aerospace and naval shipbuilding, with the partnerships welcomed by the industry.
“The work of RMIT is a great example of how universities can identify the emerging needs of industry and partner with external providers to produce graduates with skills for the new economy,” said Jonathan Russell, Engineers Australia’s National Manager of Public Affairs. “When we talk about the future of work, much of the conversation is centred on STEM in schools, but universities also play a crucial role.”
Teaching
With advances in technology, changes have been made to how subjects such as engineering are taught at university.
Raphael said one major change for students is the accessibility of tools and the ability to achieve more within the course time for Industrie 4.0-related work.
“Due to the complexity and multi-disciplinary nature of these technologies, teaching can be challenging, as many skills need to be mastered before meaningful student projects and labs can be delivered,” Raphael said.
“There is limited time to teach the concepts and different software applications to result in an IoT or AR experience.”
But he said the barriers to entry for technologies such as AR have been removed at RMIT by providing a single, scalable solution that could be used in undergraduate design and engineering courses and projects, through to more advanced IoT-integrated projects.
Increasingly connected devices
Gartner forecasts that 8.4 billion connected devices will be in use around the world in 2017, up 31 percent from 2016, and total spending on endpoints and services will reach almost $2 trillion in 2017.
This demand is expected to continue increasing – Gartner predicts connected devices will hit 20.4 billion by 2020.
“With the big data generated by these devices expected to rise at an even faster rate, the need for local skills and technology that can handle this demand is clearly evident,” said Paul O'Shaughnessy, PTC business manager at LEAP Australia.
O’Shaughnessy said almost all engineering projects are now adopting a more multi-disciplinary approach, as many industries that were traditionally focused on mechanical products are now incorporating additional design requirements related to electronics, embedded software and some form of connectivity.
As a result of the amount of data that is now available, he said new systems and processes to manage and make sense of this will be required to convert data into useful information by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence technology.
O’Shaughnessy said the next five years will be critical for engineers, as the current trend of product complexity and connectivity increases.
“The role of engineers is likely to broaden from the past where software, data capture and analytics will come increasingly to the fore as core skills,” he said.
“The involvement of engineers in certain industries will continue much further into the lifecycle of the product, equipment, system and services as more information is obtained from the field.”