In my latest AI in Manufacturing podcast episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter, CEO of XMPRO where we discussed How to Build Intelligent Digital Twins with Generative AI. Here are five key takeaways: 1. Digital Twins Are Evolving: What was once just a static data model has now become anticipatory. Digital twins are now being embedded with AI, moving from being reactive (responding to issues) to proactive (predicting issues before they occur). 2. Generative AI is Revolutionizing Busin...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 1
Peter Sorowka is a recognized expert in Industrial IoT and the technical architecture of data-driven industrial production. In 2015, he founded Cybus - a software company specializing in secure and governance-strong IIoT Edge and Smart Factory solutions. As CEO of Cybus, he has been advising and guiding global enterprises towards decentralized, secure Smart Factory and data-driven Smart Services across various industries such as automotive and battery manufacturing, machinery and tool builders o...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Had the pleasure of hosting Jim Gavigan on my latest podcast episode, where we deep-dived into "Data-Driven Optimization in Process Industries." We discussed leveraging data for efficiency, the challenges of data quality, and choosing between foundational principles and cutting-edge ML algorithms. Jim also highlighted the significance of tools and strategies in this sphere, emphasizing the urgency of digitizing domain knowledge in the face of an impending knowledge drain. Jim, is the President a...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 42
By now, we're all aware of the profound impact Generative AI promises for manufacturing. Beyond just assisting engineers in application development, it equips managers with cutting-edge analytics and delivers invaluable error resolution insights to technicians, etc. - all through intuitive interactions. That's why I'm excited about Tulip Interfaces' new "Frontline Copilot" which uses LLMs for natural language interaction between operators and manufacturing systems. To truly comprehend its signif...
Sep 11, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 41
For years, manufacturers have had to navigate in relative blindness, implementing improvements on an as-needed, reactive basis. This approach, although functional, has been markedly inefficient and reactive, particularly in terms of process optimisation and asset reliability, two vital aspects of industrial operations that can profoundly impact efficiency and profitability. Digital Twins represent a transformative shift from this reactive approach to a proactive, predictive one. They facilitate ...
Jul 18, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 40
DataOps for Digital Transformation In Manufacturing. In this episode, Kudzai Manditereza interviews Aron Semle, the CTO of Highbyte. HighByte is an industrial software company founded in 2018 with headquarters in Portland, Maine USA. The company builds solutions that address the data architecture and integration challenges created by Industry 4.0. HighByte Intelligence Hub, the company’s award-winning Industrial DataOps software, provides modeled, ready-to-use data to the Cloud using a codeless ...
Jul 05, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 39
As companies with industrial operations struggle to economically access data from intelligent devices located in remote and challenging environments, LoRaWAN presents itself as a cost-effective solution. With the capacity to locally integrate industrial data and transfer it via a private LoRaWAN network over vast distances, LoRaWAN simplifies protocol conversion and enhances data recovery. To learn more about the LoRaWAN for Industrial IoT applications I had a chat with Wienke Giezeman. Wienke i...
Jun 27, 2023•41 min•Ep. 38
Digital transformation in manufacturing fundamentally involves transforming unprocessed data into valuable insights to guide business decisions through automated systems or human intervention. Consequently, implementing a well-thought-out data modelling strategy is key to successful digital transformation as it helps to express the meaning of the data to digital systems. To learn more about Data modelling for Industrial IoT in general and for Digital Twin use cases in particular, I had a podcast...
Jun 22, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 37
In the face of a rapidly evolving industrial landscape, agility and innovation have emerged as core drivers of growth. It is essential for manufacturers to adapt swiftly to changes, harnessing new technologies and embracing new processes that fuel their development. But achieving this level of agility and innovation is not without its challenges. So how do organizations successfully navigate these hurdles to lay the groundwork for a meaningful digital transformation? To understand the complexiti...
May 30, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 36
In smart manufacturing, effective data collection and analysis are crucial. But to truly succeed, it's essential to integrate the coordination of personnel, equipment, and materials into the process. For the factory worker, this would typically be through a series of digital nudges that guide their decision-making throughout the day, enabling them to work in harmony with smart machines for optimal results. To discuss more the value and implementation of human-machine collaborative systems fo...
May 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 35
The Node-Red project turns ten this year.🎉 And yet, its remarkable potential remains largely untapped in the industrial software domain. Having been a Node-Red user and promoter since its early days, I've observed that its preparedness for enterprise deployments is a key challenge limiting its broader adoption. To discover the most effective strategies for deploying and managing enterprise-grade Node-Red applications in Industrial IoT, I invited Nick O'Leary for a podcast conversation. As the c...
Apr 11, 2023•47 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Digital transformation of a manufacturing enterprise is a complex process that goes far beyond simply sending data to the cloud and implementing “predictive maintenance”. It requires a strategic architectural approach that effectively utilizes your data ecosystem to make informed decisions in real-time and drive innovation at every level of your organization. While there are various architectural approaches, the Unified Namespace (UNS) stands out as the most effective approach to achieve optimal...
Apr 03, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 33
In this latest episode, I explore the capabilities of OPC UA PubSub and how it can be integrated with Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) to standardize industrial field-level data transfer. I speak with Melvin Francis, the Project Manager for OPC UA and TSN-related services at BE.services GmbH, to discuss the challenges faced in developing related applications due to the lack of ready-made OPC UA + TSN stacks or SDKs. We also delve into the value of OPC UA + TSN integration and how it can address t...
Mar 30, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 32
The Unified Namespace has countless advantages over traditional architectural approaches when it comes to IIoT implementation in manufacturing. Some of these are: 👉 More efficient communication and data sharing between different devices and systems. 👉 Improved scalability due to a unified interface that is consistent across the entire enterprise network. But how do you go actually go about building a Unified Namespace Architecture? To gain an understanding of this, I invited David Schult...
Dec 12, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 31
When you look around a factory, you are likely to see objects interacting with other objects. And there are specific things that each object can do. It, therefore, makes sense that, in order to build autonomously reconfiguring factories, each object needs to be able to describe its capabilities to other objects so that they can interact with no human intervention. OPC UA Information Modelling is an effort to enable the description of complex industrial systems through a standardised and obje...
Oct 23, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Gaining competitive advantage is the main driver of innovation in nature as much as it is in technology. And the manufacturing ecosystem is no different. In manufacturing, this manifests in the deployment of production automation systems on the shop floor, and enterprise planning systems on the top floor. But yet, there's a grey area in between that has, for the most part, remained underutilised or wrongly implemented altogether. This is where a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) would l...
Oct 13, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 29
I invited Maciek Wasiak for a podcast conversation on Predictive Analytics in Manufacturing and he delivered a masterclass. Maciek is the CEO and Founder of Xpanse AI, a company that develops technology that rapidly accelerates Data Science delivery by replacing manual data science with AI-driven processing Here's the outline of our conversation: ✅ Xpanse AI ✅ Introduction to Predictive Analytics ✅ Real-World Data Science Use Cases in Manufacturing ✅ Semiconductor Fabrication Predictive An...
Oct 06, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Whenever you're faced with information overload on any subject matter, as is the case with many manufacturers considering Smart Manufacturing, it's important to take a step back and understand its first principles. Without which it would be difficult and costly to realise the vision of Smart Manufacturing. To help bring the First Principles of Smart Manufacturing to light, I invited Conrad Leiva for a podcast conversation. Conrad is the VP of Ecosystem and Workforce Development at the Clean ...
Sep 29, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 27
More than anything else, the foundational power of personnel in fieldwork merely lies in the fact that we can see. By extension, it makes sense that the biggest impact on industrial digital transformation will come from embedding vision in intelligent connected components. More so when embedded vision and AI software are widely deployed in mobile and battery-powered field equipment. To learn more about building this capability into industrial products, I invited Taylor Cooper for a chat on...
Sep 22, 2022•40 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Here's the thing. Containerisation is not only an IT technology, it is an advanced IT technology. And yet, it already looms on the horizon for Operations Technology. And, while the technology opens up massive opportunities for optimisation and efficiency in the OT network, it demands a fundamental rethink of industrial software distribution and management. To find out what this actually means for vendors, engineers, and system integrators in the industrial space, I invited Neil Cresswell for...
Sep 22, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 25
While there may be disagreements on what data modeling, encoding, and transportation technologies to adopt for Industrial IoT, there's one aspect that's evidently being agreed upon across the board. The fact that Publish-Subscribe architectures are, by far, more suitable for this new world of hyper-connectivity. One implementation of such an architecture for IIoT is OPC UA PubSub, which defines a mapping of Binary and JSON encoding over an MQTT, AMQP, and UDP-based PubSub network. To under...
Sep 08, 2022•46 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Advanced as they may be, modern analytics systems fall short of enabling the complete digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises. For example, instead of only detecting symptoms of impending machine failure, what would be more valuable would be to determine the actual cause of failure. Causal Machine Learning, a recent advance in ML holds the problem to solve this problem. To understand how it can be applied in Digital Twins to enable complete digital transformation for manufactur...
Sep 04, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Done right, the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises has less to do with plugging in smart objects to collect data from the factory floor. Rather, it has a lot to do with laying down a reliable, secure, and scalable data processing infrastructure in such a manner that it allows you to automate your entire manufacturing business process. And for engineers and architects tasked with building IIoT solutions, it involves picking the right tools for each part of your data processin...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 22
By now, It's no longer up for debate whether artificial intelligence will permeate the industrial automation space as much as it has the commercial sector. The biggest challenge, I'd imagine, is how do we build a robust enough nervous system that brings data to the AI agents at the industrial edge for processing, with unlimited horizontal scale. To understand in-depth how that could work, I invited Angelo Corsaro for a chat. Angelo is CEO and CTO at ZettaScale Technology, a company working to br...
Aug 25, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Naturally, standard Ethernet does not guarantee real-time communication. So, to provide guaranteed cycle times and latencies for machine control and process automation using Ethernet, vendors implemented real-time Fieldbus protocols on top of it. Thereby creating a specialised type of Ethernet that is unusable for anything else, and causes fragmentation of industrial networks due to incompatibilities of Fieldbus protocols. But yet, for the success of Industry 4.0, what is required is one type of...
Feb 23, 2022•36 min•Season 1Ep. 20
As the saying goes, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater". Many people in the manufacturing space are quick to dismiss Web 3, and justifiably, because of the recent sensationalism created around it by Big Tech. And yet, Web 3 has the potential to massively impact how we build production systems. In fact, the success of Industry 4.0 lies, to some extent, in the enablement of decentralised peer-to-peer networking of factories, with decentralised storage, compute, and connectivity. In any c...
Feb 18, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Another year has come and gone, and still, almost every IIoT use case in manufacturing requires some sort of compute capability near the source of the data in order to solve some of the toughest challenges in Manufacturing Digital Transformation. But yet, the currently dominant model for Industrial IoT is the Cloud-Based Platform-As-A-Service. The issue is, while Edge Computing architectures do provide immense power and capabilities such as system resilience through delegation of computational w...
Jan 17, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 18
The biggest challenge in the transition to Industry4.0 lies in the horizontal and vertical integration of information flow within and across manufacturing organisations, and the digitalisation of the engineering processes involved. Among the technologies and standards developed to enable this flow of information, is the compelling combination of AutomationML, OPC UA, and the Asset Administration Shell. To discuss this combination, I talked with Dr. Miriam Schleipen, the Chief Research Officer at...
Nov 04, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Perhaps the most common silos of information in Process Industries are the skilled workers who possess rare knowledge on how to optimise processes and maintain production equipment using traditional methods. The good news is, the future of manufacturing is one where plant assets and operations have the capability to autonomously learn and self adapt in order to optimise processes with minimal human intervention, thereby freeing the skilled human resource for more value-added tasks. And that futu...
Oct 29, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Based on the undeniable success of Advanced Data Analytics in Internet Companies, there's no doubt that manufacturers could reap massive benefits from adopting this "Data First' approach. And for manufacturers, having this intelligent layer at the edge, closer to industrial data sources has proven to be more fitting and valuable. To gain an understanding of the application of Edge Analytics for intelligent automation, I had a conversation with Martin Thunman. Martin is the CEO and Co-Founder of ...
Oct 20, 2021•49 min•Season 1Ep. 15
