From IoT to AIoT: Digital transformation becomes smart automation
By ANASOFT | www.anasoft.com
The Internet helped usher in the fourth industrial revolution. Digital twins and AI are the latest emerging technologies pushing digital transformation to a whole new level at the cusp of the fifth industrial revolution.
The exponential growth of new technologies is disrupting established forms and models across all industries. Although digital transformation permeates all areas, manufacturing (industry) and logistics (transport) belong to the forefront of early adopters when it comes to new (disruptive) technology, solutions and concepts. The Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins and artificial intelligence - the essentials from the inventory of Industry 4.0 – have become instrumental in accelerated and pervasive innovations. These technologies maximize the productivity, quality and variability of products to an extent that conventional technology fails to achieve.
Internet-driven industrial transformation
The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the major enablers of the digital transformation which connects physical objects and non- physical entities through cyber-physical systems. Cyber-physical systems are the next generation of Smart Industry systems for intelligent manufacturing and logistics operations management.
These systems consist of integrated computerised and physical elements that plan, manage and control company ́s processes regarding manufacturing, logistics, maintenance, quality control and supply chain in real time. Companies can dynamically and seamlessly react to external and internal factors and sudden market changes.
Modern Smart Industry systems use the internet to connect machines, tools, personnel, transportation vehicles and data together in a sprawling network from shop floor to top floor. Manufacturing and transportation companies are spending to support production operations, management of production assets and material flow monitoring, which are the core functionalities of modern Smart Industry systems.
Digital twins and the rising intelligence of industry
A currently trending technology is digital twin that has already been integrated into Smart Industry systems. Digital Twin is a virtual representation of physical objects, processes, persons, data, systems and environments. The technology serves as a virtual model of real-life counterparts and a dynamic agent of data and state information acquired through a large number of sensors and actuators.
Digital twin is implemented to monitor physical objects and non-physical entities and processes in real space and real time. The deployment of digital twin in complex simulation models accelerates and facilitates decision-making, as it renders the identification of potential outcomes much easier, while identifying crucial behavioural patterns in the chosen processes. Predictive analytics is one of its many possible utilizations. However, in cyber-physical systems, the digital twin ́s scope of functionality broadens extensively.
The technology of digital twin enables a physical object to interact in a virtual and also a real-world environment thus creating an active digital twin or intelligent information agent. This form of digital twin is widely used in Smart Industry systems for dynamic planning, autonomous management and monitoring of manufacturing and logistics processes, or for flexibly managing selected segments of a supply chain. This kind of digital twin is already equipped with a certain degree of artificial intelligence (AI).
From IoT transformation to AIoT revolution
The internet revolutionized all aspects of business and industries with Internet of Things solutions deployed throughout enterprises and supply chains. After IoT, the next wave of extensive disruption will result from artificial intelligence (AI). The upsurge of computing capacity, the sheer volume of available data and the speed of its transfer, the ubiquity of the Internet of Things and cognitive technology (machine learning) are contributing to a paradigmatic shift.
Digital twins combined with IoT and AI can transform regular objects, those that do not have an original predisposition to be “smart”, into intelligent things and usher in the dawning of the Artificial Intelligence of Things era (AIoT). Virtualization will transform manufacturing tools, machines, materials and products into fully fledged intelligent things that will require little or no human interference.
The deployment of IoT, digital twin and AI has opened a new chapter of interconnected, digital and intelligent enterprises and supply chains. Smart Industry systems assure dynamic and autonomous process management of manufacturing and logistics, thoroughly levelling up the possibilities of automation.
Digital transformation is progressively turning into smart automation, while the increasingly growing digital ecosystem of enterprises and factories is turning into a more tightly connected and organic structure. The very notion of automation is being challenged and revised in the fourth industrial revolution and the fifth revolution, ie AI, is imminent. Automation will evolve into the autonomization of processes.
Find out more about Smart Industry trends at: trends.anasoft.com