Event details: The German national industrial strategy platform "Industry 4.0 Platform" held a high-level launch conference in Berlin, announcing the completion of a new round of organizational restructuring and redefining the technological roadmap for the next five years. This platform is jointly composed of the German government, leading industrial enterprises, research institutions, and industry associations, and is the top-level design organization for industrial automation and digitization in Germany. This restructuring includes 17 core industrial enterprises joining the board of directors, covering multiple fields such as automation systems, process instrumentation, software, chemical engineering, and energy. Industrial artificial intelligence has been officially designated as the core strategic goal for the next stage.

The conference announced the establishment of 8 special working groups and 4 cross industry technical committees, with research directions including automation engineering standardization, digital landing of small and medium-sized enterprises, construction of industrial data ecology, OT/IT network security, legal and data property framework for industrial digital twins, and standards for intelligent sensor interconnection. The platform will subsequently hold multiple public seminars for the industry from August to September, open for technical exchanges with automation system integrators, sensor manufacturing enterprises, and end process industry users.

One of the core goals of this strategic adjustment is to address the data exchange barriers between automation equipment and on-site instruments from different manufacturers. In traditional automation projects, German LK, Siemens PLC, VEGA radar level gauge, and other brands of pressure transmitters often require separate configuration of drivers and configurations. There is a lack of unified digital description models between devices, and the workload of equipment replacement and system expansion is enormous. The platform plans to promote standardized equipment information models, allowing intelligent instruments and controllers to automatically identify, load parameters, and upload equipment health data when connected to automation systems, significantly reducing the implementation and later maintenance costs of automation projects.

The platform also emphasizes that the safety of industrial automation is of paramount importance. With more and more intelligent instruments connected to industrial networks, the risk of OT side attacks continues to rise. The working group will develop special network security standards for process industry tank areas and silo measurement and control scenarios, balancing the convenience of remote debugging and online diagnosis with production system security.