IIoT: Technical vs. people skills
You want your factory to be IIoT enabled. You’ve seen the videos and read the case studies. It’s obvious: IIoT technologies are central to your digital transformation. But where do you start? How do you…
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Modelling robots and Cyber Physical Systems
Webots (https://cyberbotics.com) is a simulation environment for the design and modelling of robotic systems. Since robotics invariably results in some physical actuation, Webots can also be used to model Cyber-Physical Systems, and being open source,…
How to make reading work for you
A review of research literature is a useful thing to do. It helps us understand what the current thinking, developments and practices are with regard to a particular subject area. The process of creating the…
Data, analysis, computing and creativity
Asking questions of data can be hard work. We can often struggle to frame the ‘correct’ question, that will give us the answer we need. And while we have tools that can ‘drill-down’ and `slice-and-dice’,…
Data tools: less can be more
The explosion of interest in data analysis has led to a wider audience participating in the development of new methods and tools to help gain new insight. Careers in Data Science are relatively new, but…
Understanding types of data
Good data visualisation communicates meaning to a wide audience in an unambiguous way. Unfortunately, a lot of data visualisation is not so effective and communicating meaning. There can be many reasons for this, from not…
IIoT Kanban – not so easy
Any factory floor supervisor knows that the more raw material/components/work-in-progress that is pumped into a manufacturing system, the longer the lead-time. Put another way, the order is delivered late, and subsequent orders cannot be planned…
Some initial considerations for simulating systems
There are a few approaches to creating simulations that affect how we construct our models. The first approach is to do something called a Discrete-Event Simulation. With this model, we look at our system and…
Planning for flexible manufacturing systems
For decades there has been talk of the ability to design flexible manufacturing systems, that can accommodate variations in demand and remain efficient. The variation in demand might be volume; the goods may be seasonal…
Scrub your IIoT data clean
Your IIoT equipment is installed. You can see the devices on your network. Your log files are being written to when the machine runs. What next? Initial excitement can soon turn into dismay when you…
Simulation as experimentation
Resources are generally more constrained in an SME manufacturer than for a large corporate organisation; there isn’t the luxury of a research and development department, or an intelligence unit that deals with reporting, analysis and…
Digital transformation: an approach for SMEs
All the hype from Industry 4.0 creates a lot of impetus for SMEs to ask how they can make it work for them. SMEs are focused on doing more with less, and are motivated to…
Lean + IIoT = skills gap?
Central to lean manufacturing is the empowerment of people. Lean can’t work unless there is a pervasive culture that will experiment, implement and evaluate. The lean methods enable employees to focus on fault diagnosis and…
How is Industrial IoT (IIoT) different from IoT?
The Internet of Things is becoming more widely understood, at least in terms of the vision. Connecting ‘smart’ objects together, so that they can work together to solve goals requires ever-decreasing units of computation to…
Is ‘Lean’ key to Industry 4.0 adoption?
Lean methods in manufacturing concentrate on the elimination of wasteful activities and resources that do not add value to the final product. If something isn’t required, why pay for it? Industry 4.0 is about using…
We’re not ready yet for Industry 4.0
Computer security is a topic that frequently emerges when talking with a manufacturing business that is curious about “digital transformation” or “Industry 4.0”. I find that a lot of SMEs are sceptical about Industry 4.0,…
Some challenges for Cyber Physical Systems
Cyber Physical Systems are one step towards our quest to build smart systems. Smartness implies convenience, and there many compelling visions of the technology improving the quality of our lives. Smart phones are ubiquitous now,…
Applied analytics for Cyber Physical Systems
From the National Institute of Science and Technology definition of a Cyber Physical System: “Cyber-Physical Systems or “smart” systems are co-engineered interacting networks of physical and computational components. These systems will provide the foundation of…
Systems that reason
It is commonplace for autonomous systems to be referred to as smart systems. These are characterised by features such as high availability, the ability to repair themselves and possessing intelligence to be able to manage…
Cyber Physical Systems and Agency
One of the attractions of Cyber Physical Systems thinking is that it has the potential to not only automate tasks that humans don’t/can’t do, but also there is the possibility of task delegation. From the…