Is Industry 4.0 Really a Revolution? And IEC 61850?

There are so many discussions, concerns, arguments ... Pros and Cons regarding Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4.0, IoT, IIoT, Cloud, Edge, data lake, ...).

The most remarkable statements I have heard are from Mr. Ralph Langner who does not believe that it is a revolution at all ...

"Is Industrie 4.0 actually the 4th Industrial Revolution as touted by it's many proponents. Ralph Langner tackles that question in this 20 minute video from S4xEurope."

Click HERE for the youtube video of his presentation (20 min)

Please find some personal opinions:

Please find a paper discussing the "sprint" versus "marathon" in automation of electric power systems I wrote in 2012 through the following post:

http://blog.nettedautomation.com/2012/03/smart-grids-19th-century-invention.html

Here is part of my experience:

I was (as a 21 year old skilled worker in 1973 ... just married) responsible for maintaining a fire alarm system with 6,000 alarm buttons (from a famous vendor ... full of TTL chips ...). The system stopped almost every night ... I had to drive downhill 60 km ... to switch it off and on and go back home ... I was not skilled enough to do anything serious about it ... just wrote reports to my boss ... he ignored everything ... I quit my job in 1974 and went back to high school in January 1995 and university in 1977 ... 7 1/2 years later I finished university with four kids in 1982 ... went back to that same company ... quit again in 1992 partly, in 1997 completely ...

The most crucial reason to quit in 1992/1997 was: The standardization of industrial communication systems in IEC TC 65 released a myriad of non-interoperable Fieldbusses ... good for selling standards ... very BAD for maintenance people and many others ... can you imagine to be an expert in tens of fieldbusses?!

Check out this post:
http://blog.nettedautomation.com/2017/04/iec-sc-65c-published-5000-pages-of-new.html

Oh my dear ...

I just checked my personal records from the 70s and found the weekly reports of my daily maintenance activities ... spent many days to switch off/on the Fire Alarm System ...

This may happen every hour these days where maintenance people just switch IEDs off and on ... in the hope that it will work after restart.

We need more well educated and skilled experts!!! ... grey hair seniors ...

What's about IEC 61850? Is the introduction of this standard series different compared to the fieldbus standard series IE 61158? Sure ... there is a crucial difference:

MANY Fieldbus standards for ONE application (real-time data exchange) ...

ONE IEC 61850 for MANY applications (real-time, protection, asset data, configuration, engineering, ...SCADA, ...).

IEC 61850 series is quite comprehensive and complex ... Yes. But: it seems to be easier to learn and experience ONE complex standard than to do this for 50+ solutions!! IEC 61850 is not a revolution - it could be used to extend existing solutions ... it provides a new approach that could prevent the proliferation of hundreds of vendor-specific solutions ...

And when it comes to security, there is ONE standard series (IEC 62351) for IEC 61850, IEC 60870-6 (TASE.2), IEC 60870-5-104, DNP3, ...