Industry 4.0 needs machines, data and artificial intelligence with the supervision and analysis of experts.
Big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, artificial vision or automation are trending terms and form part of the latest socioeconomic movement of our time, the fourth industrial revolution. A change that is already transforming production processes and that affects our daily lives.
But in order to talk about the fourth industrial revolution, there must have been three others before it. And to best understand this one, it is necessary to pause for a moment to briefly remind ourselves of the details of each of the previous ones.
Second half of 18th Century. England. Process of sociocultural and economic change that ended mass human and animal labour and brought with it a transformation in people’s lives that had never been seen before in history.
Carbon, the steam engine, looms and the railway are some of the main innovations of the first industrial revolution.
Second half of 19th Century. Western Europe, United States and Japan. Process of deep change in society with the invention of new communication systems, materials, energy sources and transport which changed the world as we know it. Thanks to all of these, mass production was achieved, and society was able to access new goods and services.
The Ford T car, the telephone, electricity or the use of crude oil are the most important developments that emerged during this period of history.
Mid 20th Century. European Union, United States and Japan. Information and communication technology, and renewable sources of energy powered the second half of the 20th Century towards unprecedented globalization.
Computers and the internet are the cornerstones of the third industrial revolution.
21st Century. Movement on a global level. We can also call it the data revolution. It is based on digitalizing the production and industrial process of the economy. The so-called digital transformation and the tendency for everything to be interconnected and automated.
Big data, the cloud, artificial intelligence and robots are, among others, the pillars of the new industry 4.0.
As with every great technological and socioeconomic change, this industrial revolution offers great opportunities. Throughout history, it has been found that after each industrial revolution that has occurred since the 18th Century, the quality of life for people has increased exponentially.
Technological change during the different periods of history have led to economic and social transformations in people’s daily lives. As we have been recapping, revolutions have been improving society’s living standards, getting rid of manual labour hours and giving people more free time, better wellbeing and an unprecedented growth in both the population and the economy.
We must look at industry 4.0 as a coin that will always fall with the side of opportunity facing upwards. Changes in production processes and the implementation of automation such as management technology in many industries, have been transforming job profiles, and they will continue to change in the coming years. It will create a multitude of new jobs which will bring greater efficiency to processes, combining the automation of services with high-value manual tasks.
The new production process which is being developed in industry 4.0 needs machines, data and artificial intelligence as raw materials in order for it to work, without forgetting that it must be implemented with the supervision and analysis of experts. An example of this collaboration between automated robots and new job profiles are factories and intelligent warehouses. A production process covers thousands of square metres and fully automated, efficient and secure workflows for the staff that work alongside robots, sensors and cameras. Thousands of pieces of information are collected each second through the programming of robots and artificial intelligence, which manages and interprets it, allowing productivity to increase notably.
But in this industrial revolution, not everything has to rely on data. It is important to emphasise once more that there are people behind all of industry 4.0. Men and women with extraordinary skills to continuously create, innovate and improve what we have now, creating infinite opportunities to grow as a society.
As we have already mentioned, the skills that we have today to measure and collect data offer us a multitude of possibilities to detect improvement opportunities. Sensors, installed on intelligent devices which have been expanding throughout all areas of our lives, constantly measure data which is stored on a cloud. Therefore, large volumes of heterogenous data are accessible from anywhere thanks to the internet and can be managed by big data tools and interpreted instantly by artificial intelligence systems which provide solutions and help with decision making.
This data analysis through big data and artificial intelligence serves multiple purposes, such as predicting consumption, detecting anomalies, performing predictive maintenance, monitoring the performance of any production system in real time or constructing tools which help with decision making.
Industry 4.0 undoubtedly goes hand in hand with optimization. The automation of production reduces errors, therefore making the process more efficient. The drastic cost reduction in production processes offers businesses higher profitability thresholds.
We are immersed in the fourth industrial revolution. An era where people will continue to be the cornerstone of progress, and the abilities of humans to adapt to continuous change is and will be fundamental to progression and continuing to create value. The data is there, but we must know how to interpret it and seize the growth opportunities that industry 4.0 offers.
QUALITY CONTROL IN INDUSTRY 4.0
The Fourth Industrial Revolution involves an authentic transformation in all areas of society; with industry, as we know, being one of those affected the most.
THE SMART FACTORY IN INDUSTRY 4.0
The term "smart factory" refers to a focus on industry responsiveness to prevailing market and socio-economic trends by making production more flexible and integrated.
THE TREELOGIC APPROACH: WE DEAL WITH DATA
One of Treelogic’s main objectives, in all of our projects, is to help the client discover how data can add value to their business. Identifying and exploiting the competitive advantage within any sector is fundamental in order to achieve the best market position.
TO DEEP, OR NOT TO DEEP, THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Deep Learning is an active area of research and is revolutionizing other domains within the broader field of artificial intelligence. One of these areas is artificial vision, or Computer Vision.
TREELOGIC BIG DATA ARCHITECTURES
The millions of pieces of data that are currently generated in the digital age would be of no use without systems to channel all that information. The group of technologies that enables the mass processing of this data set is what is known as Big Data.
TREELOGIC, THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Our abilities are applied to multiple scenarios and the solutions that we develop to improve production processes, in environments such as predicting quality, helping with decision-making, among others, are transforming our customers in businesses in the world of technology.
COMPUTER VISION
Human beings have a system of vision which allows our eyes to capture what is around us and our brain to process the information, and thanks to this we are able to assess a situation and use this as the basis for making decisions. Computer vision aims to achieve this same effect through automatically obtaining visual information from cameras, digitizing and processing the images in terms of understanding what is happening, and transmitting the result in order for the appropriate authorities to act accordingly.
TREELOGIC: BANKING AND INSURANCE
These are times of continuous change. Our society, once more stable, is now experiencing permanent and dynamic change as a consequence of advancing technology. The constant transformation we are experiencing affects all areas of the economy, and financial organisations play a crucial role in this whole process.