Industry 4.0 (i)

What is the fourth revolution? What is Industry 4.0?

There are few milestones in human history which can really be recorded as revolutionary. And the main question would be what makes an event decisive to humans, that is to say on which aspect of human life has an event effects to be considered major.

Some of those few occurrences can be featured as agriculture, printing or steam engine invention. What these have in common is that three of them increased the amount of information an individual could access, as well as they have increased spare time. In other terms, those events enabled the conditions to make information reachable to grow individuals’ knowledge and awareness.

Popularization of internet access has raised space and time frontiers and permits a level of exchange of information and knowledge that has no precedent to the date. Those of us who love surfing the net are sharing and learning in a cycle which is made up on cooperation to raise awareness to the highest level approachable.

What is Industry 4.0?

Industries must go ahead on digital transformation in the deepest sense which is further more than providing geolocation to distribution fleet or giving storage managers a tablet. Digital transformation involves a deep analysis of each organization’s strategy by means of:

• Being proactive on re-thinking how businesses can take profit from technology usage. Which strategic advantages can businesses take on implementing technology to their market or main activity?
• Assuming risk as an inherent part of the decision processes. Organizations must get used to define the level of risk they are able to tolerate, and if they found out this is lower than needed, management should work towards perfecting risk assessment to include evolving scenarios risk. This is necessary and the chorus of digital transformation driving and it must be accompanied of cooperation, innovation and adaptation to implement rapid and effective corrections in a continuous improvement environment.

Which are those key issues to face Industry 4.0’s transition?

Industries must consider some key issues to select how they are going to carry out technology-driven innovations:

• Obsolescence: Which is the ride of the technology under evaluation? Is that concrete technology supported enough by well-known main-drivers or perhaps is just in vogue?
• Scalability: Does that reference technology suits to the organization? Is this innovation suitable come along with company’s structure as it grows and evolves?
• Integration options: Is that improvement embeddable with the organization structure and procedures? And even more relevant, is that technology able to be integrated to the organization environment (providers, consumers and institutions)?

The focus’ chore repeats itself along history

More data and more information provide higher levels of knowledge and available time to implement innovations, and as époques pass wheel is becoming even faster.

Technology trends applied to industry are those which are based on information collecting and provision, and how organizations and industries use all those evidences and knowledge to:

• Improve and automatize processes by creating self-managed processing procedures.
• Predict market’s and consumers’ needs, and adapt their structures to satisfy them as the environment changes.
• Determine the key factors conditioning supply chains and implement technology-based solutions.
• Increase efficiency (energy, water, prime mater) and get the subsequent environmental impacts reduction (reducing consumption and waste generation).

Internet of Things and Big Data: Knowledge in the cloud

Internet of things was born on the idea that each and every item in our daily life were connected to internet and, even more, is transmitting data continuously. The concept itself was born in the last years of the twentieth century at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and it is, presumably, the key for further society’s evolution.

Imagine your home is connected to the internet and knows expected weather for the day, inner temperature, presence or absence of you and your family and when you are arriving home, what are your comfort temperature preferences and how much heating lasts on increasing temperature one degree. By means of these data your heating installation could start working at the exact moment needed to match your temperature expectations.

Those new data sources are the basis of what has come to be called Big Data. It was formerly defined as huge packages of complex information which come from novel sources. Taking the former example as a basis big data would bring policy-makers an invaluable resource to, for example:

• Defining individuals’ and families’ preferences with the aim of driving campaigns to conduct or assess them to reduce energy consumption.
• Finding out which are the determinant factors on energy waste: building’s age, orientation, amount of inhabitants, etcetera.
• Measuring realistic efficiency of different heating systems.
• Anticipate the amount of energy’s further demand for certain area in a determined period of time, depending on weather forecast.

The previous list could be much longer: Data availability is able to thin former limits if suitable tools are within reach, and this is exactly what is Big Data engineers task.

How can Industry 4.0 add value to food supply chain actors?

In general terms topics must be avoided. Despite this some of them express such ineffable truths that deserve being mentioned and to the present issue there is no better catch phrase than “Information is Power”.

Forecasting food supply chain tendencies

Big Data nourished by IoT can provide organizations enough awareness on what consumers think and feel about their products and even better they can approach which are the forthcoming trends. 

Some initiatives like the American Food Genius  uses Big Data to enlighten cutting-edge perceptions around culinary world and their core business is based on offering those insights to food supply chain actors so they can improve their presence and development in the market.

Big Data can also be used, for instance, to predict the content of the market basket and define preferences among different segments of population so companies can focus their marketing and R+D to make their products more valuable for consumers.

Reducing environmental footprint 

As was already set in former posts diet and food supply chain are main actors in most of environmental issues to face on the next decades. Those impacts related to food are directly linked to two factors: waste generation and inefficient usage of resources.

If our foodstuff, fridges and pantries’ data would be connected to industries and retailers it would be easy to adjust production and consumption to a level that waste would be closer to zero. This would imply that food quantity to be produced could be calculated in adjusted predictions of what is going to be acquired and consumed by means of precise forecasting.

Waste reduction based on consumption prediction premises would be only the most evident applications. However when it comes to analyze inner food supply chain features the IoT is able to provide a level of process improvement unheard of before, for instance:

Storage and transport

Collecting detailed data from storage and transport conditions (temperature, distance, route, weather) would help to predict organoleptic features (smell, color, taste) to a point that lifespan could be precisely adjusted to reality according to prime mater well-known conditions.

This level of certainty would be possible thanks to data management, interpretation and modelling. These would define in which terms would external conditions affect prime mater, with the aim of predicting real lifespan for manufactured products.

This would avoid unnecessary waste from those products which are supposed to be expired but whose nutritional and sensory properties remain perfectly suitable for human consumption.

Predictive maintenance

Production lines are often forced to stop because of faults, despite maintenance efforts’ to carry out preventive actions on them. In those production downtime most of foodstuff turns unsuitable for consumption and becomes a waste.

In this terms, IoT can be used to measure those parameters which are proved to be critic to certain kind of failures (vibration, heat, wearing). This would determine breaking points so they can be detected previously to failure in what is called predictive maintenance. 

Despite this concept isn’t novel at all, real possibility of monitoring almost every parameter of an engine with low-cost hardware turns this level of monitoring unreachable to many industries. This is only possible thanks to the underselling and popularization of wireless connectivity. This advances joined to sensors’ development and refinement is lowing costs and making accessible for any size of organization predictive maintenance.

Precision agriculture

Traditional agriculture has shown to be inefficient when it comes, for instance, to fresh water consumption and fertilizer usage. Now it is possible to measure soil hydration, pH, bioavailable nitrogen and phosphorus concentration, and other data related to crops and their development. This implies that farmers can know exactly what to plant, when to harvest, how much water use and when and how it is necessary to fertilize. The whole of this would be possible to be carried out efficiently by basing activities on information collected by wireless sensors, and would deplete the impacts regarding water usage and nitrogen and phosphorus emissions.

Achievable wireless

To the date wireless data transmission is compromised by two main factors: connectivity and energy supply. Open source and collaborative networks have arrived to stay and improve and popularize wireless data communication. The best example to that is LoRa a wireless technology which permit reaching high levels of security and cover longer distances. This has an extra feature: the low energy consumption since some devices’ batteries are expected to last near 5 years long.

It is time to say goodbye to low-ranged devices that consume batteries “as hot cakes”. Among those novel technologies that are coming to stay, 5G and LoRaWAN have landed to become a winner combination on connectivity and data transmission. The combination of both will make possible the lowest energy demand and the fastest and wider range of data transmission seen to the date.

Let’s imagine… If you had de possibility, which of the parameters of your daily life, or your organization, would you like to monitor? and… Would you explain the reason for your choice?

Thank your for reading!