Paid Program: The Next Step in Manufacturing

Inside the innovations paving the way for Industry 4.0.

Today, the most precious resource in the manufacturing industry isn’t steel, coal or electricity, it’s data. Manufacturers are on the cusp of Industry 4.0, a new industrial revolution driven by artificial intelligence and massive connectivity.

In this new age, the use of sensor data and digital systems will allow businesses to monitor processes taking place in the physical world, paving the way for more flexible modes of production—an approach increasingly required by changing consumer demands.

THE 4TH REVOLUTION

“There are more and more capabilities people are discussing, like the use of IoT, robots and augmented reality in manufacturing settings,” says Kaibo Liu, associate director of the IoT Systems Research Center and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “You’ll start to see higher and higher resolution data gathered from the manufacturing process, making more aspects of decision-making possible in real time.” While some elements of the next industrial revolution remain aspirational, others are already being realized. With the right partners, today’s businesses can access many of the gains in efficiency, safety and productivity promised by Industry 4.0—and set the stage for the transformative next step in manufacturing.

“you’ll start to see higher and higher resolution DATA gathered from the manufacturing process, making more aspects of decision-making possible in real time.”

Kaibo Liu

Associate Director of the IoT Systems Research Center | University of Wisconsin–Madison

Bringing I.T. to the factory floor

As Industry 4.0 approaches, manufacturers are making the jump from legacy computer infrastructure to new network solutions driving faster speeds, better data management and increased energy efficiency.

“Our role in translating the physical to the digital means that the insight we generate at the edge has now got to be able to talk to everything else that’s in a particular plant,” says Martin Cotter, senior vice president of worldwide sales and digital marketing at Analog Devices. “Having a real-time, high-bandwidth connection across each system enables greater control of various production processes. That’s driving efficiency, it’s driving more certainty of output and it’s driving a next-generation industrial process,” he says.

“Having a REAL-TIME, high-bandwidth connection across EACH system ENABLES GREATER CONTROL OF VARIOUS production processes. THAT’S DRIVING EFFICIENCY.”

Martin Cotter

Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Digital Marketing | Analog Devices

Percentage of total manufacturing costs caused by downtime

Unplanned downtime has a steep cost for manufacturers—and preventing it is a major goal of the technologies that will define Industry 4.0.

The Cost of Downtime

At the heart of the new industrial era is a concept known as interoperability, or the ability to communicate real-time data across numerous Industrial IoT devices. Manufacturing floors use equipment, software protocols and proprietary networks from a number of equipment manufacturers. To date, there has been no way for these individual protocols and networks to talk to each other, but the emergence of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) will enable this for the first time. Given the high volume of data produced by today’s smart factories, a robust on-site network is virtually a prerequisite for interoperability. One technology helping to enable it is real-time Deterministic Ethernet, which can better manage the high volume of data innate in a connected factory. In addition to leading the charge on sensor technology, partners like Analog Devices are pioneering the hardware (such as real-time Deterministic Ethernet switches), forming what amounts to a factory’s central nervous system.

HARDWARE MEETS HARD HATS

“We are the source of data. We are where data is born. For 50 years, we've been the company people rely on to solve their toughest engineering challenges. Our experience in this space is the basis for all of the future advancements we’re building with our clients today.”

Martin Cotter

Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Digital Marketing | Analog Devices

Wall Street Journal Custom Content is a unit of The Wall Street Journal advertising department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.

CONNECTING THE FACTORY FLOOR

Analog Devices is helping manufacturers realize the benefits of Industry 4.0.

LEARN MORE

With the bedrock of interoperability in place, manufacturers can begin to adopt Industry 4.0’s most exciting advances, such as robots and “cobots” capable of working alongside humans on the factory floor. Like autonomous vehicles, these machines are supported by advanced sensing solutions that intuit their surroundings three-dimensionally, ensuring a high degree of safety while they perform repetitive and complex tasks.

Making the leap is no simple matter. Most factories rely on an existing, sometimes dated, technology ecosystem. Simply replacing old equipment with new equipment is expensive and often unrealistic. It’s one reason why the road to Industry 4.0 may be a matter of augmentation rather than replacement, bringing the intelligence enabled by modern-day IT down to the fieldbuses and cabling on the factory floor. By setting up a wireless, sensor-driven communication network at the production level, partners like Analog Devices help manufacturers realize the promise of emerging technologies such as condition-based monitoring. Here, the health of a specific machine or part can be monitored by sensors, allowing plants to identify, diagnose and solve abnormalities before they become an issue or possibly even fail outright. This real-time monitoring can help extend equipment lifespans and increase throughput. Given that unscheduled downtime can amount to nearly a quarter of total manufacturing costs, predictive maintenance has the potential to unlock significant savings and productivity.

THE NEXT STEP IN MANUFACTURING

Traditionally, manufacturers have designed their plants to mass produce a small number of products (or even a single product) at high volume. But today, a greater level of flexibility is required as consumers expect more options and levels of customization than what was available in the 1920s—or the early 2000s, for that matter. “If you want to buy a car, there are many options you can choose from,” says Kevin Carlin, vice president of the automation and energy group at Analog Devices. “Manufacturers need to be able to cater to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different configurations. Then they need to manage the entire plant and supply chain to be able to respond to that in real time, and configure their factories to move from one model to another.”

LOST PRODUCTION

LOST CAPACITY

COST OF LABOR PER UNIT

COST OF HOLDING INVENTORY

SMART AUTOMATION

INTELLIGENT EDGE NODES

ROBOTS AND COBOTS

REAL-TIME DETERMINISTIC ETHERNET

Partners like ADI can combine different sensing modalities, like vision and time of flight, with connectivity technology such as Deterministic Ethernet to transfer data in real time and have more precise control of robots and cobots. According to one report, the use of these tools could help drive an estimated net savings of $40.4 billion per year for U.S. manufacturers.

TOMORROW’S FACTORY

Next-generation solutions are bringing the promise of Industry 4.0 to fruition, driving productivity and gains in efficiency, safety and flexibility.

For manufacturers, taking that next step into the future depends on further investment in the technology underpinning advances in factory automation and flexibility. It’s here, at the sensor-driven level where the physical world meets the digital one, that the gains promised by Industry 4.0 are truly being realized.

With sensor-powered analytics, plants can identify and fix issues with machinery before they fail and disrupt production.

Condition-Based Monitoring

Networking products custom-made for industrial use can enable IoT communication even in harsh manufacturing settings, which can pose challenges with radio frequencies.

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Advanced motion controls and sensing solutions are taking robot-human collaboration out of the realm of science fiction— and into the factory.

Robots and Cobots

Source: “The Costs and Benefits of Advanced Maintenance in Manufacturing,” U.S. Department of Commerce, April 2018.

DRIVING THE FUTURE

It’s easy to imagine the future of transportation: a world where commuters are shuttled to work by self-driving cars, the trucking industry runs exclusively on electric vehicles and flying taxis—yes, flying taxis!—are just a tap away in your favorite ride-sharing app.

Today’s innovations are paving the road for tomorrow’s autonomous ELECTRIC vehicles.

POWERING THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION

Wall Street Journal Custom Content is a unit of The Wall Street Journal advertising department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.

FIND OUT MORE

Analog Devices is paving the way for the future of transportation.

PEDAL TO THE METAL

Analog’s work enhancing vehicular radar and lidar mark important waypoints on the road to full autonomy, enabling many of today’s aspects of automated driver assistance. These technologies build on the company’s signal-processing technology—some developed and honed in the high-performance industrial space—to help the car sense (and effectively “see”) its surroundings, with present-day use cases in features like collision avoidance and parking assistance. As vehicles move toward the next stages of autonomy, radar and lidar will be at the core of the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which will allow for faster object detection and classification and enable the vehicle to distinguish between a tree, a motorcycle and a child, for example. Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) also allow a vehicle to maintain location accuracy when driving. IMUs are able to accurately measure the vehicle dynamics, trajectory and orientation to compensate when features like radar, lidar and GPS can’t be relied upon (like when a car enters a tunnel).

Vice President of Autonomous Transportation and Automotive Safety | Analog Devices

Chris Jacobs

“THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE CAR UNDERPINS MANY OF THE NEEDS OF AUTONOMY. THESE CARS ARE COMPLETELY RE-ARCHITECHED FROM THE GROUND UP, MOVING FROM INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES TO ELECTRIC DRIVES.”

These advances serve as prerequisites for another industry turning point: autonomous vehicles. “The electrification of the car underpins many of the needs of autonomy,” says Chris Jacobs, vice president of autonomous transportation and automotive safety at Analog Devices. “These cars are completely re-architected from the ground up, moving from internal-combustion engines to electric drives. A similar re-architecture is being considered for the sensing networks in the car. We provide the ideal platform to build fully autonomous vehicles, because that EV architecture work supports moving forward with more sensors in the automobile, which can sit upon the electrified platform in the powertrain.” Full autonomy won’t exist tomorrow, although research is already well underway. Instead, most automakers and equipment manufacturers are adopting an incremental approach, introducing elements of autonomy as they become reliable and cost effective. Ultimately, the technology underpinning these features will support far more extensive forms of autonomy, like fleets of self-driving robo-taxis.

THE ROAD TO AUTONOMY

President and Chief Executive Officer | Analog Devices

Vincent Roche

“If the first 50 years of ADI were dominated by hardware, the next 50 will be increasingly dominated by the software required to perceive the world in ever-smaller degrees of granularity.”

Autonomous vehicles are typically thought of as years removed from present-day reality. But in some respects, the technology that will pave the way for full autonomy is already being utilized—and changing the way we think about transportation.

A BETTER BATTERY

Vice President of Automotive Electrification and Infotainment | Analog Devices

Patrick Morgan

“WE CHOSE TO GO AFTER THAT PROBLEM BY MAKING EXTREMELY EFFICIENT AND ACCURATE SYSTEMS THAT ENABLE THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE TO GET THE MOST USABLE ENERGY OUT OF ANY GIVEN BATTERY PACK.”

While the groundwork for that future is already being laid, bringing it to fruition isn’t as easy as getting from point A to point B. The cost of electric batteries remains a significant barrier to the broader adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), which still tend to have a shorter driving range than their gas-powered siblings. And while some aspects of autonomy are relatively commonplace (think assistive technologies like obstacle detection), fully autonomous cars currently exist largely as experimental prototypes used in carefully controlled environments. So what does it take to make the future of transportation a reality? The answer depends not only on getting buy-in from consumers, policymakers and utilities. It also depends on forging the right partnerships, making the right investments and never taking your eyes off the road.

Here, Liu explains, the challenge again comes down to supporting increasingly immense volumes of data. “In Industry 4.0, IoT will enable thousands or even millions of sensors, each continuously collecting data,” he says. “So how do we monitor all of these data streams? One answer may lie in the emergence of 5G, which will allow manufacturers to collect sensor data at higher frequencies while also pulling more sensors into the system.”

DRIVING THE FUTURE

Wall Street Journal Custom Content is a unit of The Wall Street Journal advertising department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.

CREATING THE INTELLIGENT FACTORY

Interested in learning how you can stay ahead of the technological future? Click here to receive Analog Devices’ executive guide on how your company can thrive during technological disruption.