Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) - its future impact on two-year engineering technology education

Gary Mullett

Download Paper | Permalink

Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: Two-Year College Potpourri
Page Count: 13
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41831
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41831
Download Count: 370

Paper Authors

biography

Gary Mullett Springfield Technical Community College

visit author page

Gary J. Mullett, a Professor of Electronics Technology and the present Department Chair of the Advanced Engineering Technologies (AET) Group, presently teaches advanced technology topics at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) located in Springfield, MA. A long-time faculty member and consultant to local business and industry, Mullett has provided leadership and initiated numerous program and/or curriculum reforms as either the Chair or Co-Department Chair of the four technology degree programs that formerly constituted the Electronics Group and now continues in that position for the AET Group. Since the mid-1990s, he has been very active in the National Science Foundation’s ATE and CCLI programs as a knowledge leader in the wireless telecommunications field. A co-founder of the National Center for Telecommunications Technologies (afterwards the ICT Center) located at STCC, Mullett also played a principal role in the development of the innovative and long running Verizon NextStep employee training program that led to a two-year associates degree in telecommunications for hundreds of the companies’ employees. The author of two, technician oriented, textbooks, Wireless Telecommunications Systems and Networks and Basic Telecommunications – The Physical Layer, Mullett did both his undergraduate and graduate work (in microwave Remote Sensing) in the ECE Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he also taught the undergraduate sequence of courses in electromagnetics. He has presented at numerous local, regional, and national conferences and also internationally on telecommunications and wireless topics and on the status of the education of electronics technicians at the two-year college level. His current interests are; the development of novel and innovative systems-level approaches to the education of technicians, uses of the emerging field of networked embedded controllers and sensor/actuator networks, and wirelessly enabled cyber-physical system applications in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0.

visit author page

Download Paper | Permalink

Abstract

Today, a Google search of Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) routinely yields over a half a billion hits. Even if the average person doesn’t know what Industry 4.0 or the IIoT entails, they have probably heard one of these newly coined terms at some point during recent times. Today, we don’t wait for historians to tell us when a technology paradigm shift occurs, we tend to recognize the change as it is happening and duly note the new generation with the appropriate numeral. Most industry observers believe that we are in a new phase of the industrial revolution that focuses heavily on inter-connectivity, automation, machine learning, and real-time data. Many in the manufacturing industry are wrestling with how to implement this digital transformation for their particular set of circumstances. At the same time, academia is struggling with how to adapt and modify traditional curricula in this field in an attempt to determine in what manner we should best educate the engineers and technicians to deal with this new reality. To this end, the American Society of Engineering Educators (ASEE) has been hosting a year and a half long series of online webinars about Industry 4.0 that will culminate with the Workforce for Industry 4.0 Summit to be held in Washington, DC during the spring of 2022. The goal of this initiative is to transform the engineering and manufacturing workforce for Industry 4.0. So far, the vast majority of topics covered by the ongoing ASEE webinar series on Industry 4.0 have been engineering degree centric with very little participation by educators at the two-year college level that teach the technicians that go into this field. Fortunately, there are many advanced manufacturing initiatives sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program (aimed at two-year colleges) that address the needs of the manufacturing industry. However, most of these projects address specific new manufacturing processes as opposed to a systematic look at what Industry 4.0 means to the advanced manufacturing industry and the skill sets needed to deal with the digital technology applications (i.e. the industrial Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, AI and augmented reality, big data and data mining, etc.) being integrated into manufacturing. This paper will take a look at some promising programs addressing this issue, make some educated recommendations about changes that need to occur in the education of the technical workforce for Industry 4.0, and propose some solutions to how these changes may be integrated into present day advanced manufacturing programs.

Citation
Format

Mullett, G. (2022, August), Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) - its future impact on two-year engineering technology education Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41831

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Today, a Google search of Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) routinely yields over a half a billion hits. Even if the average person doesn’t know what Industry 4.0 or the IIoT entails, they have probably heard one of these newly coined terms at some point during recent times. Today, we don’t wait for historians to tell us when a technology paradigm shift occurs, we tend to recognize the change as it is happening and duly note the new generation with the appropriate numeral. Most industry observers believe that we are in a new phase of the industrial revolution that focuses heavily on inter-connectivity, automation, machine learning, and real-time data. Many in the manufacturing industry are wrestling with how to implement this digital transformation for their particular set of circumstances. At the same time, academia is struggling with how to adapt and modify traditional curricula in this field in an attempt to determine in what manner we should best educate the engineers and technicians to deal with this new reality. To this end, the American Society of Engineering Educators (ASEE) has been hosting a year and a half long series of online webinars about Industry 4.0 that will culminate with the Workforce for Industry 4.0 Summit to be held in Washington, DC during the spring of 2022. The goal of this initiative is to transform the engineering and manufacturing workforce for Industry 4.0. 
So far, the vast majority of topics covered by the ongoing ASEE webinar series on Industry 4.0 have been engineering degree centric with very little participation by educators at the two-year college level that teach the technicians that go into this field. Fortunately, there are many advanced manufacturing initiatives sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program (aimed at two-year colleges) that address the needs of the manufacturing industry. However, most of these projects address specific new manufacturing processes as opposed to a systematic look at what Industry 4.0 means to the advanced manufacturing industry and the skill sets needed to deal with the digital technology applications (i.e. the industrial Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, AI and augmented reality, big data and data mining, etc.) being integrated into manufacturing. This paper will take a look at some promising programs addressing this issue, make some educated recommendations about changes that need to occur in the education of the technical workforce for Industry 4.0, and propose some solutions to how these changes may be integrated into present day advanced manufacturing programs. 

AU  - Gary Mullett
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) - its future impact on two-year engineering technology education
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/41831
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--41831
ER  -