Click to learn more about author Devansh Sharma.
Somewhere in the city of Houston, Ralph is spending time with his kids in the dining room after a long day at the refinery, when he gets a call that one of the pressure units is down. He takes his laptop and tries to figure out when the maintenance was due and realizes that there are still 15 days until maintenance. He calls up the maintenance vendor to inform him about the emergency and to schedule an appointment for the following day, but in the meantime, the refinery will lose more than $20 million, which is huge by every standard – that’s the 2000 era for you.
Fast-Forward to 2020
Ralph is playing with his kids when he receives three back-to-back notifications from the predictive maintenance solution on his phone with the following information:
First: Residual life of pressure unit is 7 days
Second: Maintenance is scheduled for tomorrow
Third: Acknowledgement received from vendor
Ralph looks at these notifications and continues the game with his kids – that’s one of the boons of Industry 4.0.
What Is Industry 4.0?
Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, writes in his book The Fourth Industry Revolution:
“Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”
4.0 (as it is popularly known) will be the era of connected devices in which the insights from data collected through machine sensors will help organizations enabling faster, flexible, and more efficient processes to produce higher-quality goods at reduced costs – which will increase productivity, foster manufacturing growth, and fuel economies like never before.
Transforming Technologies
The world has made tremendous advancement in technology since the last revolution and the new age tech will fuel Industry 4.0. Technologies that will play a major role are:
- Big data and analytics
- Augmented reality and virtual reality
- Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
Big Data and Analytics
The advent of the idea of Industry 4.0 is partially credited to the amount of data that machines are producing. There are terabytes of data getting added to the repository every moment. Some is getting captured, and some is yet to be captured.
Large manufacturing plants have three kinds of equipment today: The first set of equipment was procured in the last decade and has the ability to capture data, process it, and further drive insights out of it. The second set consists of equipment that is older than the previous set and is equipped with sensors to convey data but lacks the storage and compute capability. Then there is an aged lot that doesn’t even have the sensors to convey data. Mostly organizations are looking at replacing the third set and adding storage and compute to the second set, but irrespective of what they do with these, there are terabytes of data getting produced every minute.
Big data and analytics will play a major role in Industry 4.0 by the collection and comprehensive evaluation of data from multiple sources and further converting that into actionable insights.
Case in point: A refinery in the Gulf Coast is working with a large data and analytics player to develop the digital twin of their refinery so that they can predict and preempt any maintenance and performance issues in the refinery well before it occurs.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
Augmented reality (AR) was invented in 1968 at Harvard when computer scientist Ivan Sutherland – known as the “Father of Graphics” – created an AR head-mounted display system, but it took almost 40 years to get the technology out of labs. In 2008, an agency in Germany used it for a magazine ad for BMW Mini, which, when held in front of a computer’s camera, appeared as a 3-D image on the screen of the computer. Although it was a very basic use of AR, it paved the path for larger adoption.
In Industry 4.0, we will put AR to much larger use, starting from the selection of parts in a warehouse to send repair instructions over handheld devices to receiving information back. AR will be used widely across the industry.
Case in point: Ford Motors is using FIVE (Ford Immersive Vehicle Environment) virtual reality technology to create virtual representations of vehicles (prototyping and design).
Warehouses have started using AR for inventory management. Using an iPad camera they can identify where a particular item is stored, current stock, required stock, etc.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
4.0 would be incomplete if we didn’t talk about IIoT. More and more devices are equipped with embedded computing, which not only allows them to communicate with one another but also with the centralized controllers. Each communication is producing a gargantuan amount of data, which opens possibilities like never before.
Case in point: Insurance companies are using the data from connected vehicles to calculate customized premiums for their customers.
Manufacturing companies are using IIoT for machine-to-machine connectivity.
Drones are being used for search-and-rescue missions.
Our generation did not witness the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, but we are fortunate to see 4.0, which is much larger, swifter, and impactful. The aftereffects of this revolution will be witnessed by our generation and will keep serving the generations to come.