Leapfrogging into Industry 4.x: A post Covid 19 perspective

By Sudip Mazumder, Head of E&C Industry Digital, L&T-NxT and GM, L&T

2020 has witnessed unprecedented changes in the human society. Even though I am writing this the effect of COVID 19 is full on. Lock down in different parts of the world continues while other parts either has opened up or gradually is planning to open up for economic activities carefully.

One stark think that has been observed around world is the common way of dealing with the Corona scare. It did not matter which mechanism a country is following, which continent a country is situated in, position of it in the industry or human development index, rich or poor, advanced in any industry segment or not, the one common scare that gripped the Governments of all form is Healthcare and with a common objective of saving human beings.

In the process, the countries and governments spent and distributed resources as much as they could irrespective of their size of the economy. ‘Lock down’ became the weapon to saves masses instantly which helped in tapering the ‘peak’ and ensure that somehow the strain on the healthcare could be reduced or spread.

Therefore, one common thing that showed up as the overwhelmingly important, is human health. All developments can be considered, all framework make be conceptualized, all economic activities may be carried out centering around the human being and human health.

Industry 4.0: Basic tenet is connected machine

Let’s examine one of the tenets of Digital era Industry 4.0 or I 4.0 which was made popular, since October 2012, ostensibly conceptualized by the German Government through a paper presented at Hannover Fair. Since then it has helped the business world to reimagine their manufacturing space predominantly.
4th Industry revolution, often used interchangeably with I4.0, and all the ingredients of manufacturing wherein machines and components or parts thereof, will be connected through various mechanisms such sensors, PLCs, SCADA etc., simulate the manufacturing operation in the virtualized world to understand the manufacturing operations. Many pundits today are talking about cyber-physical, bridgital and many more terms which saw the green shoots through this movement.

Many technological components became almost synonymous with the I4.0 such as IOT, IIOT, Cloud, Distributed computing, cognitive computing and AI. One can extend the tail with other technologies as well which helped in visualized the operational environment which also sometimes referred as smart manufacturing or smart factory.

The concept or design of I4.0 has multiple principles such as:

• Connectivity between and amongst devices, sensors, gateways via IOT as commonly referred as which is only going to grow more with the proliferation of devices and sensors enabled devices
• Centralised view of operations yet decentralised decision making by the way of making information available to the right people at the right time
•  Transparency of information to the appropriate set of people and for the system as whole for any kind of eventuality or decision making
• Analytics driven to be more ‘why’ and ‘how’ along with ‘what’ and ‘when’If one examines the I4.0, it will be evident that the concept is all about machines and operations around the machines in a shop floor.

It was changing but now accelerated

Given the understanding of importance of the human health needs and at the same time economic needs to open up Industry to produce, supply and consume goods from the same factory, the time has come to think of Human beings, their health, connected environments with machines and ‘men’ (no gender disparity here apart from colloquially used term) simultaneously as a part of connected operations which can possibly be referred as Industry 4.X or I 4.X. Post COVID-19, I4.X will be more relevant than 4.0 as the concept takes care of holistic needs of human beings who are running the operations.

New Industry 4.X Framework: Need for connected workplace

What could be the shape of the framework of I 4.X? Re-imagination may help building on the top of Connected I 4.0 with an additional layer which is people centric.

Manufacturing environment is not about machines only. Even in highly robotized manufacturing operations such as automotive assembly units, there are interventions of people in the shop floor, control rooms and across the plants. Plant safety has long been tackled as separate verticalized care where in processes are followed and managed, health and safety parameters are captured and dealt with separately almost as if they are delinked from the environment.

Post COVID-19, the situation is going to be increasingly different. Considering this is the beginning of highly infectious environment created by such sub-microscopic organisms, we will have different operational environment not only in the manufacturing but also in various forms of workplace.

Industry 4.X: More powerful and relevant

There are plenty of reasons why it should or could have been considered together. However, it has almost become mandatory to have the people in the workplace connected as a verticalized suite of solutions but also connected within the same ‘connected’ machines environment to understand the appropriateness of working environment, assess the behavior of the machines and people together, interdependencies of performances, interconnectedness amongst people parameters, workplace environment, health and safety parameters.
Let us look at a situation, let’s imagine, a plastics manufacturing plant which generates microparticles which can carry the aerosol with COVID 19 which can infect people working in the shop floor. In such situation it is important to know the operational parameters through connected machines, capture health parameters of the people connected, capture the environment parameters and safety parameters to have a meaningful analysis of intersections.

Environment, Health and Safety are ingredients to human health as well as machine. They may apparently be independent; however, the complex relationship model can be established from the shop floor and operations data hence can be taken as an integral part of Industry 4.X.

One more aspect needs to be evident to add more horsepower into the Industry 4.X framework is Artificial Intelligence alongside Analytics with a clear distinction between classical analytics, statistical modelling versus data science and AI driven approach. AI will also link up the variables through petabytes of data coming out of multiple sources effectively help bridge the gap amongst machine, people and environmental interactions in shop floor as opposed to the unidimensional machine-based understanding of shop floor.

AI will also bring in, through vison computing and NLP branches of science, integrated data driven approach which is not in the standard or text form but also voice, pictorial and video forms in the I4.X which make I4.X a significantly improved framework compared to its predecessor.

Connected environment, therefore, may be extended to people, the core assets of any organization along with the machines which is part of Industry 4.0. The extended concept can be termed as Industry 4.X which will connect the operations in many industries and will be more complete in nature and can be digitalized to leverage business efficiency.