Industry 4.0 - Thinking differently

Introduction

While many organisations might still be in denial about how Industry 4.0 could impact their business or struggling to find the talent or knowledge to know how to best adopt it for their unique use cases, several others are implementing changes today and preparing for a future where smart solutions improve their business.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ― Albert Einstein

Industry 4.0 is all about thinking differently, it is to look at the entire picture rather than the problem at hand, to change the playing field, rather than the games being played on it, to rephrase the question, rather than digitizing the answer.

It is changing the necessity for queuing at an airport, by having the ability to track people from the concourse to the airplane, a supermarket without a checkout, a smart village with autonomous vehicles to fill a first mile / last mile function, or a container terminal where insurance claims are assessed via location of freight?

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

In Professor Klaus Schwab’s book entitled “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” he describes how the fourth industrial revolution is fundamentally different from the earlier three, which were characterized by advances in technology.

From the first industrial revolution (mechanization through water and steam power) to the mass production and assembly lines using electricity in the second, the fourth industrial revolution will take what was started in the third with the adoption of computers and automation and enhance it with smart and autonomous systems fueled by data, smart delivery, and machine learning.

“In this fourth revolution, we are facing a range of new technologies that combine the physical, digital, and biological worlds. These new technologies will impact all disciplines, economies, and industries, and even challenge our ideas about what it means to work, and the environment we live in.”

To thrive, business leaders will have to actively work to expand their thinking away from what has been traditionally done and include ideas and systems that may never have been considered.

Disruption - Digitalizing the Environment rather than the Process

If an environment is:

“the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or community,”

A combination of processes usually governed by standards and laws or “the way we have always done it,” that influence the community using them, which could include Inventory moving around a warehouse, or asset tracking around a hospital, where staff sit and what is done every day.

The ability to digitalize any one of these processes is not difficult, it involves documenting, digitalizing the human function, or making what is done smarter, but as Schwab states, we need to go so much further, as the greatest barriers to this revolution will be a lack of foresight and fear of disruption.

So, in creating disruption, will require going beyond digitization of the process, and in following Schwab, we should look to the environment rather than the isolated streams.

What problem are we are trying to solve, to be disruptive and think differently?

Worldwide above 90% of road accidents are caused by human error, resulting in the death of 1.2 million people (about the population of the South Island) and 36 million left injured.

Thinking differently, what is the problem we are trying to solve?

Can an automated solution address this, or alternatively can use technology to address socially attitudes toward public transport?

Today the industry is addressing driverless vehicles by trying replicate the human, limiting the vehicle to what a “Driver” would see and reinforcing the practice of a car with a single occupancy …. Would not a better alternative be to remove the human all together and rethink the entire strategy.

Where a fully autonomous platform should not need to “see” where it is going, it follows rules and acts in a predictable and controlled manner … leading to increased efficiency, and in turn greater safety, and when it is used for a First Mile / Last Mile solution from home to a public transport hub, the number of cars on the road drop dramatically …. But to make this a reality, it will need control, an eco-system that accurately reflects its surroundings.

 A Digital Reflection

A digital reflection of the physical world becomes a different way of looking at the problem.

If we to understand the environment as “is the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or community”, it could be further distilled into the combination of influences over people and processes, that occurs a specified area.

From which we could conclude that

·         The Area could be defined as any piece of real estate, a factory or a Building, a constant that rarely changes.

·         And the People, assets, inventory “things,” are the variable items, changing in real time.

If we think differently, the “Area” can be reflected in a Digital World, over which we can track and managing things, where logic is applied around what the things do or where they are both through there interaction with the physical world, and through external adaption.

Therefore, a digital reflection becomes the control, adapting to changes in the physical environment below, and input from external services, 2 two-way conversation through a smart Network.

Where the reflection is the Master, and the physical world a Slave.

 Conclusion – The application to the real world

If Industry 4.0 is all about thinking differently, a Digital reflection is the ability to look at the entire picture rather than the problem at hand, with a 2 ways conversation from the digital reflection through an edge network, there is the ability to track, measure, understand and control any variable items moving in the real world, in real time.

With compute being distributed throughout the framework, timely based logic can be stacked through multiple data sources and applied to manage the physical environment.

To date the application of this solution have included several proof-of-concept solutions.

·         such as an Autonomous Vehicle running over a Private LTE network in South Auckland,

·          Water reticulation based on water inputs controlling wastewater pumps,

·         Drones flying in the Middle East and smart Stadiums for the 2022 world cup ….

The Key to the model is too able to Think differently, technology is an enabler and solving the problem the priority.

” Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing it is stupid.” Albert Einstein