The New World of Connected Machinery

THE NEW WORLD OF CONNECTED MACHINERY

How intelligent machines in the Industry 4.0 era will transform everything we know — by Dirk Vermant

and done amazing things for us. But today we are in the middle of a giant revolution. Machines are becoming intelligent. Machinery automation is like our human body. We see with our eyes. That’s sensing. We move with our hands and arms. That’s actuation and we process with our brains. That’s process control. Machines have classically been only like the actuation. Over the past 30 years, we added a lot of sensors and sense into machines. But still, machines are missing one key element and that is intelligence.

The fourth industrial revolution will bring that into life. Why do we call it “fourth”? The first one was the steam machine. The second one were linear assembly systems. Think how Henry Ford’s did it with his Model T. Actually they were first implemented in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Third were the robots that entered our factories and fourth is now the combination of physical products, intelligence and big data.

All those elements like autonomous robots, additive manufacturing technologies and big data analytics, they already exist today. So it’s starting to happen. They are not full blown yet and not yet connected to each other. Once they are, it will allow for new ways to produce, to design, for companies to operate and it will also change the way how we work and the world of labour.

You might say, “Well, how does this all help us?”

Think about a helicopter stuck somewhere at a remote place in Africa. It’s needed in a food delivery mission. The next mechanic engineer is some 17 flight hours away. But we want the chopper back in the air within two hours. This is possible with Industry 4.0. We will figure out in seven minutes.

Let’s first look at the production and the products we all like – food and beverage. That’s a $600 billion industry constantly innovating in order to catch our attention. Let’s take the example of yogurt, 500 millilitre a glass. In the past it came in four flavours. Today the very same product from the very same company comes in 96 variants. If you look at the machinery that’s behind that, it’s a fascinating piece of equipment able to produce some 24,000 of those yogurts per hour. But in essence, the machine is dumb. It will do exactly how it was set up. So if we want to fill hazelnut yogurt and we have a chocolate packaging and chocolate label around that, the machine will do exactly that and you will have hazelnut yogurt that looks from the outside like chocolate, all 24,000 of them per hour. In the best case, this error is detected before the product leaves the factory. It will create a quality

cost, something that the industry very nicely calls product loss. It makes up to eight percent of the value in food production or some $15 billion annually. In the worst case, if this error is not detected, it may send a nut-allergic consumer straight from supermarket to the emergency room.

Well, why does this happen? A typical machine is fast and it can sense but there is no real connection between the two. This would be different in the area of 4.0. Each physical product, whether it’s yogurt, the container or the label will have what we call a “digital twin”. That’s their surrogate in the software world. Here it is where the machine will detect that nut and chocolate is a mismatch and will stop their process automatically.

Now yogurt is just one example. Food & beverage is just one industry. We look at a multitude of applications throughout all industries. Engineering fights very hard to improve an annual improvement of one to two percentage points. Here we have the opportunity to make production 30 percent faster and 25 percent cheaper. That’s a true leapfrog. A giant step for production.

What is even more fascinating is the fact that you can basically re-innovate companies. Take for example a harbour crane. Its hand, its actuation

is a motor. That’s a beautiful piece of equipment that lifts a container as easily as you lift a pencil. Manufactures of this equipment, sells them to harbour operators for around €5000,- a piece. With new technology and added sensors those motors are the basic layer for a software model. The motor can sense the real weight in real time of the container as we lift it, as opposed to the weight that it’s in the paperwork and that might be just a little bit different. While lifting the container, it sends that data to a software model which then builds a 3D model of the ship. The digital twin of that ship will tell the motor exactly where to place the next container in order to optimise the weight balancing of the ship. With an optimised weight balancing, that ship can save up to €1000 a day on fuel. That is some five to eight percent gain in fuel efficiency. Adjust by optimising the shuffling of the container. That is quite a big impact just for a reshuffling.

While bringing that technology into the market, other ideas. What if instead of selling that motor as an equipment, we charged a couple of cents for each weighing and trimming movement that we did.

So the harbour would only pay if the crane is on duty and for Motors and more, it would mean they would be charging a couple of cents. But a lot of

them per year, they could make up as much as 1000 euros per year. Definitely a much more profitable business model than the one we saw before.

So for companies that know how to adjust to this digital world, that’s great news. But you might say, “Great for production, great for companies. What about us? What about human labourers? Are we just sitting there and watching as we lose our job to those smart machines?” The simple answer to that is yes. There is certain mechanical work that will not be needed any more. Think about moving stuff in a factory, checking, “Are we filling hazelnut in a chocolate container?” That is not needed anymore. Machines will do that automatically.

If you look at an economy like Germany over the next 10 years that means some 600,000 jobs will be gone. But there’s more to that. With new technology, new business models, newer tasks emerge. They will need a lot of software programmers, data analysts and 3D modellers. That will result in a gain of about one million new jobs in an economy like Germany it’s a gain of 400,000 jobs.

So you might say, “Wait a second. That might be interesting for the economy. But what if I didn’t go to school and learned the right things, the software modelling, the likes? Will I be out of a job?” Today,

your employer looks a lot at your education and your years of experience. But we can change that with technology. Think back about that helicopter stuck in Africa in a remote place and think about what if you had an augmented reality glass on your head, connected to a central computer that would know everything and every detail about that machine. You could basically perform the repair action that’s necessary because it would tell you – again, as an overlay of the real world, that’s again the digital twin, where to place your tools, which parts to repair. You could suddenly fix a helicopter as easy as a picture book. Our grandparents used to be farmers could suddenly fix a helicopter even if it’s the first time the touches one.

This new opportunity are really exciting and this new world of connected machinery and Industry 4.0.-machines will not be able to do the work on their own. Interaction with humans will remain a critical success factor.

Some of the low-skilled jobs that might disappear, they will be replaced by new skilled jobs. The curiosity and creativity of engineers will lead us to new and better ways to master our business and personal lives.