Industry 4.0 in Italy: IEC61499 as cornerstone for the “Fabbrica Diffusa®” regional initiative

In line with its mission of incubator of the best available innovation and of technology transfer to the territory, the ambitious project promoted by ComoNExT – Innovation Hub foresees the realization of the first factory model spread across Europe.

Sharing energies and efforts, the result will be a real Factory 4.0, whose single areas and production islands will be distributed in different cities and yet closely linked to each other.

The “Fabbrica Diffusa®” (i.e. “widespread factory”) initiative aims at rising awareness among Italian SMEs about the full potentiality of the latest disruptive technologies of Industry 4.0, as well as of the need to approach new business models connected to it.
Technically led by Synesis, European Competence Centre for IEC-61499, “Fabbrica Diffusa®” proposes a state of the art functional architecture for Industry 4.0 – from shop-floor level to the Cloud services – that companies can implement today, choosing the most appropriate “modules” based on their industrial requirements.

Among them, the IEC-61499 (provided by nxtControl/Schneider-Electric solutions) is a cornerstone of the distributed real-time control layer, offering the perfect match between the time-based and event-based domains.