Page 19 - EngineerIT October 2021

AUTOMATION AND CONTROL

Five Smart Machine trends
Five Smart Machine trends

you need to know

he past 10 years have brought about tremendous monitor the effectivity of their assets. Logistics efforts now
advances in technologies that original equipment require intense coordination of IT based tracking solutions
Tmanufacturers (OEMs) never realised would so coupled with autonomous controlled material handling
dramatically impact on their designs or the saleability of machines to satisfy next day deliveries and shifting consumer
their machines, much less on business models and profits. demands.
Standardisation of network adoption across manufacturing At the same time, open technologies have exposed
operations and convergence with office and operational vulnerabilities to both internal and external threats in cyber or
systems, have escalated the need to enhance information flows physical worlds. Security and safety challenges have increased
from production machinery and warehouse operations while in complexity and future proofing against unknown threats is a
improving the performance, intelligence, and communications critical design criterion for OEMs today.
of individual components. In this article Dave Wibberley shares So how do OEMs respond with smarter machines to ensure
key advancements and recommendations from Mitsubishi which higher levels of value to their customers while navigating more
all OEMs should be adopting in their design processes to stay complex technology requirements?
current and competitive.
Several trends have impacted production operations over the These five innovations create a foundation for improving machine
last decade, creating the need to enhance automation systems to intelligence and desirability while offering the added benefit of
accommodate a changing global landscape. reshaping business models for enhanced revenue streams and
The aging of manufacturing workers and the lack of qualified cost containment.
replacement workers coupled with globalisation and automation
adoption, has pushed the envelope of human resources to fill 1. Things on the internet aka: IoT – Improve
ever-more technically demanding roles to augment ever-more revenue and service margins
technically complex machinery. While the common catch phrase for internet intelligence
The recent rise of common IT technology adoption to seems to captivate a lot of press, it comes down to a simple
operations systems, previously explicit to automation vendors, application of Moore’s law. As ethernet chipsets have increased
has presented manufacturers with challenges in both human in processing capacity, the price has come down to a point
resource management as well as capital expense deployment. where every industrial sensing or actuating device has inborn
OEMs must now adopt information technologies and intelligent capability to communicate and process information. This has
sensing as part of their designs to meet customer needs to created a generation of devices that can be reconfigured,

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