Remote Control of Large Manufacturing Plants Using Core Elements of Industry 4.0

The most big manufacturing plants such as large transfer line, large packaging machines, steel production line or plants for food and beverage are built for a long-live deployment and are usually energy-intensive processes. A redesign of mechanical parts is for a long usage term (20 till 30 years) not required. But upgrading of automation parts with more performance is a needful continuously process. An efficiently implementation of modern automation and IT technologies by currently engineering tolls is not the state of the art. On the beginning of this paper a model concept will be introduced, showing how the partition of the large plants can be performed in small collaborating parts with less complexity. The next model describes the distributed and allocated hardware and software components to determined plant parts. The developed distributed control system based on smart Ethernet nodes, which allows remote control and maintenance according elements of industry 4.0.