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Comment by crystalmeph | Hacker News Reader

I work in industrial automation, and I agree. There’s constant rhetoric about buzzwords like “Industry 4.0,” which, if it means anything specifically, means “connect all the things.”

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of thought around “is it even necessary for this three-ton industrial robot to be dynamically reprogrammed from a service center in Stockholm,” and it seems like everyone just assumes that everyone else will do a perfect job implementing and configuring security. I fear the tune will only change after the first multi-million dollar lawsuit, and I hope all that costs is the money.

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> There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of thought around “is it even necessary for this three-ton industrial robot to be dynamically reprogrammed from a service center in Stockholm,”

That's because the value proposition is only obvious when you substitute for "Stockholm" a city from one of the countries with cheaper labor.

In my limited experience with Industry 4.0, it smells like a combination of forcing a goldrush to sell shovels (so many players that want to be the platform which connects everything) on one side, and ongoing search to turn capex into opex on the other (that latter thing is a trend in pretty much all industries, though). I think there's enough companies that would happily replace their control systems (and control engineers) with prepackaged control-as-a-service which they don't have to know anything about, supplied by the lowest bidder, to which they can shift any liability if anything happens. This kind of setup does require remote access.

The thing is, there is no "one size fits all" option most of the time.

There are some packaged solutions but they all involve lots and lots of expert design, setup and management.

So quite often it actually is for the interaction with possibly expensive engineer from random place in the world who has specific knowledge for the system involved, as well as enabling remote operations when facilities are in less accessible location.

As for IIoT 4.0 - truth is a lot of industry was already heavily connected, and many functions I've seen so far are about getting deeper integration between ERP, MES, and individual work cells and workpiece tracking.

Even when the workpiece is fried chicken waiting to be put in a bun, or a cut of pipe that will next need to be appropriately cleaned, bent, welded, painted and finally become part of a ship assembly.

You hit the nail on the head. Once (legally) viable, I guarantee a large portion of our public sector infrastructure maintenance will be outsourced to the lowest bidder in the guise of saving tax money. All without any due diligence as to the safety ramifications of said actions.

> “is it even necessary for this three-ton industrial robot to be dynamically reprogrammed from a service center in Stockholm,”

The answer is Yes. Very very yes. Especially when said programmer can't travel across borders due to Covid restrictions.

But even without Covid, it's a lot cheaper and time-effective to let people look at stuff and fix things from stockholm, or antwerp, or warsaw or whatnot. Else every time your robot sneezes, you have to book plane tickets and a hotel. But worst of all, you risk losing many hours of production due to travel time.

In contrast, with remote operation, you can log in, fix problems in well under 30 minutes, and Get Production Running Again.

In a situation where any kind of stoppage basically means the factory is Not Making Money, you can see the very strong value proposition here.

I don't think it's an all-or-nothing proposition. You can share telemetry and get patches from a remote team without having the equipment connected to the internet to reduce the risk of destroying expensive equipment.

VPN or jump host, sufficiently firewalled in all directions.

Putting a defenseless PLC or robot controller on the open internet is clearly not the best of plans.

(though the amount of people using teamviewer is telling)

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