There comes a point when your spreadsheet models of business processes just don’t cut it. You observe some complexity that is just too difficult to explore. You have questions that remain unanswered because you can’t do…
Read More
Here is my invited talk about Cyber-Physical Systems challenges, for iSCI2020 in Guangzhou, China. It was pre-recorded due to the COVID-19 travel ban. Research Challenges for the Industrial Adoption of Cyber-Physical Systems Abstract: Interest in…
Experienced shop floor supervisors and production managers can often find themselves at odds with the production planning function in a manufacturing business. Tensions emerge between the organisational desire to trust the principles of Materials Requirements…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
Industry is in a constant state of flux as technologies are being developed, evaluated and deployed in order to create competitive advantage, increase productivity and efficiency, and to work towards a sustainable future. Ever-cheaper embedded…
In a previous life I was a production manager. One of the frustrations of such a role is the feeling that more control and coordination could be exerted “if only I had the data for…”….
The construction of software for an application is a complicated process. We employ Software Engineers to develop software in a way that helps us arrive at robust solutions, and it is the training and experience…
One factor that motivates industrial organisations to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is the potential to be able to monitor, control and coordinate processes remotely. This opens up new possibilities for collaboration across manufacturing…
As technology develops and becomes more accessible, people find new ways of exploiting the technology to achieve new objectives. The manufacturing industry is a pertinent example of how technology can transform productivity and increase quality…