Industry40.tv

Done right, the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises has less to do with plugging in smart objects to collect data from the factory floor. ​ Rather, it has a lot to do with laying down a reliable, secure, and scalable data processing infrastructure in such a manner that it allows you to automate your entire manufacturing business process. ​ And for engineers and architects tasked wi...

By now, It's no longer up for debate whether artificial intelligence will permeate the industrial automation space as much as it has the commercial sector. The biggest challenge, I'd imagine, is how do we build a robust enough nervous system that brings data to the AI agents at the industrial edge for processing, with unlimited horizontal scale. To understand in-depth how that could work, I invite...

Naturally, standard Ethernet does not guarantee real-time communication.  So, to provide guaranteed cycle times and latencies for machine control and process automation using Ethernet, vendors implemented real-time Fieldbus protocols on top of it.  Thereby creating a specialised type of Ethernet that is unusable for anything else, and causes fragmentation of industrial networks due to incompatibil...

As the saying goes, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater". Many people in the manufacturing space are quick to dismiss Web 3, and justifiably, because of the recent sensationalism created around it by Big Tech. And yet, Web 3 has the potential to massively impact how we build production systems. In fact, the success of Industry 4.0 lies, to some extent, in the enablement of decentralised p...

Another year has come and gone, and still, almost every IIoT use case in manufacturing requires some sort of compute capability near the source of the data in order to solve some of the toughest challenges in Manufacturing Digital Transformation. But yet, the currently dominant model for Industrial IoT is the Cloud-Based Platform-As-A-Service. The issue is, while Edge Computing architectures do pr...

The biggest challenge in the transition to Industry4.0 lies in the horizontal and vertical integration of information flow within and across manufacturing organisations, and the digitalisation of the engineering processes involved.  Among the technologies and standards developed to enable this flow of information, is the compelling combination of AutomationML, OPC UA, and the Asset Administration...

Perhaps the most common silos of information in Process Industries are the skilled workers who possess rare knowledge on how to optimise processes and maintain production equipment using traditional methods.  The good news is, the future of manufacturing is one where plant assets and operations have the capability to autonomously learn and self adapt in order to optimise processes with minimal hum...

Based on the undeniable success of Advanced Data Analytics in Internet Companies, there's no doubt that manufacturers could reap massive benefits from adopting this "Data First' approach. And for manufacturers, having this intelligent layer at the edge, closer to industrial data sources has proven to be more fitting and valuable. To gain an understanding of the application of Edge Analytics for in...

While IIoT protocols play a crucial role in communicating information from one industrial system to the next, the full value of IIoT can only be realised by standardising the vocabulary with which this information is communicated. The MTConnect Standard offers such a semantic vocabulary for manufacturing equipment like Machine Tool Controllers, Robotic Arms, CNC Machines, etc. And more importantly...

By nature, industrial facilities consist of physical assets and processes that evolve through time. Therefore, each data point generated by such systems is essentially a snapshot of events at that particular point in time. By extension, this data wants to be stored in a way that reflects the sequential order of events, so that it can be rapidly queried and analysed, among many other reasons. But y...

The success of a fully realised Industry4.0 lies in the democratisation of intelligence and the capacity for Industrial "Things" to autonomously act based on the knowledge they have. Effectively, turning each and every factory into a computer that is made up of modular processes within, in the form of Cyber-Physical systems. And central to that success, is the ease with which Industrial things lik...

As Industrial IoT matures, most of the components in the IIoT stack have become commoditised. Things like hardware, OSes, drivers, protocols, databases e.t.c But yet, many organisations still develop custom interfaces for these components, instead of adopting standards. And in cases where there is adoption, there lacks an industry-wide consistent approach to standardisation. To understand the impo...

At the present moment, it is quite clear that the future of industrial automation will be driven by software. More so, that of IIoT. And, due to the merits that have allowed it to dominate in the IT space, Open Source software is likely to lead the industrial software revolution. Regardless of the conservative nature of the industry. To discuss the use of Open Source in building IIoT solutions, I...

Nowadays, with so many IIoT concepts in the air, you can't help but breathe it in. But sometimes it's helpful to take a step back and put all of this in context to understand how we got here, as that might help shed light on what IIoT is and isn't about. To gain a fundamental understanding of OT-IT integration, I had a conversation with  Benson Hougland . Benson is VP of Product Strategy at  Opto...

While it may be convenient to follow simple steps to get connectivity working for your IIoT solution, sometimes you are better off having an understanding of the elements that make up the broad spectrum of connectivity technologies. To understand the foundations upon which IoT protocols are built, I had a conversation with  Dominik Obermaier . Dominik is the Co-Founder & CTO of  HiveMQ , a com...

Developed at LinkedIn in 2010, Apache Kafka - a stream processing engine, now powers web-scale Internet companies such as Netflix, Uber, Twitter, Airbnb, and more. Profoundly impacting real-time user experience. Of equal impact, is its application in creating a continuous streaming pipeline of manufacturing data, from the factory-floor to data centers. Fundamentally changing the structural organis...

So here's the thing, data from industrial sources is inherently messy. For example, a typical PLC system manages thousands of tags from both physical instruments and internal calculations, but this data is often unstructured, not linked to a unifying data model, and uses naming conventions that are vague to the outside world. This makes data from such sources not readily usable in analytics applic...

Cliché as it may sound, data IS the new Oil. But, to fully reap the benefits, data needs to be properly collected and advanced analytics correctly applied to it. To better understand the process, I had a conversation with one person who has close to 3 decades of building industrial data aggregation and advanced visualisation tools, Marcos Taccolini. Marc is currently the Founder and CTO of Tatsoft...

While the connectivity of industrial systems is the most important aspect of IIoT, there is currently a confusing mix of connectivity technologies and standards. To understand IIoT Connectivity I had a conversation with  Stan Schneider , who specialises in innovation where pervasive networking meets functional AI Stan is CEO of Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the world’s largest software framework pr...

The success of IIoT in mission-critical applications depends on its ability to support local storage, compute, and connectivity for real-time responses, while sending selected data to the cloud for additional analytics. In short, Edge Computing To gain a comprehensive understanding of Edge Computing, I sat down with somebody whose day job is strategising and executing at the intersection of 5G, Ed...

Having a solid understanding of the key components of an IIoT architecture and how to integrate them is the most important aspect of building an IIoT application, both as an in-house solution and as a service offering So, to help shed light on the principles of IIoT architecture design, I had a discussion with one person who is best positioned to speak on the subject,  Rick Bullotta Rick Co-Founde...

Digital Twins will, undoubtedly, transform how manufacturers build and maintain products. From consumer goods to complex structures such as buildings and aircraft. But as of now, confusion and lack of its grasp are limiting adoption. To understand the technology better, I had a conversation with  Pieter van Schalkwyk , whose company has helped Fortune 10 companies build Digital Twins. Here's what...