Big Data and Industry 4.0 at Production Cluster 2020

Today we are producing more data than at any other point in history. Efficient use of big data can provide insights, competitive advantages and form the basis for agile, self learning systems.

The more sensors, actuators and devices that are included in the industrial Internet of Things the more information we generate. And, obviously, the more data generated the more insights we are able to produce. Or at least this would be the case if we could be certain that all of the interconnected devices were capable of communicating with one another and producing data that could be interpreted and analysed by any other system.  Interoperability is a focus area for the Eclipse Arrowhead Framework and was the main topic for Professor Delsings talk at the 2020 annual conference for Swedish Manufacturing Research & Design Clusters. 

After highlighting what can be achieved through increasing adoption of the industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 technologies, Professor Delsing discussed the challenges we face if we are to fully realise these benefits. These challenges include encouraging and facilitating a broad acceptance for Industry 4.0 and promoting efficient usage, which might include ensuring that staff understand the machines and systems and learn how to interact with cyber physical systems. A key factor is, however, ensuring that machines can understand each other and that we can obtain useful data from our production facilities. After showing an overview of areas where human work is being increasingly automated, Delsing outlined the current cost of poor interoperability and outlined various approaches to achieving interoperability based on surveying and analysis work performed in the Arrowhead Tools project. The key conclusions of the presentation are that interoperability is essential for successful analytics, that factory dynamics require run-time and autonomous interoperability engineering and that if we achieve this we will gain deeper insights into factors that influence quality.

The annual Production Cluster Conference aims to provide a forum for production engineering projects to present their results as a basis for Sweden’s continued industrial development. You can read more about the Swedish production cluster here.