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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest to share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and in this episode I'm joined by Antonia and Matt to talk about industry 4.0 and figure out what it means for manufacturing and we're doing this as part of a special episode for the nuclear institute's Cumbria Branch Antonio what is your interest in Industry 4.0 we're given your background in engineering
sustainability and the energy industry now and then we get new terms particularly marketing sometimes likes to come up with things but I think you know it's interesting to see we are sort of changing the way we are doing things in industry and Manufacturing and sort of how that progresses towards the future so in my job as a energy manager we see a lot of data and we're sort of getting smarter with how we use data and also we just have more data available to base
decisions on and trying to optimize energy and reduce waste so it'll definitely be really important going forward cool so I got out of that marketing people say things and then you do stuff with data I might have a bias against marketing but it's because in sustainability I see new terminology and when I dig into it I think that sounds similar to what I've come across before why do we have a new word for it is it the same thing is it something different or people just using
a word that means one thing and then just using it in another way and I disagree with it yeah industry 4.0 is kind of like a capital for lots of different Technologies from what I've found and I guess we'll get into that in a little bit and try and Define what is this thing that we're talking about yeah Matt I know you work in the nuclear industry and I think you'll probably have a different motivation for learning about industry 4.0 compared to Antonio yeah so for me it's very much how can we
use all these different Technologies sources of information to both optimize how we operate and run nuclear facilities and take them down decommission them and how we can do that in a cost-effective way particularly minimizing the risk to Personnel by doing it cleverer quicker cheaper but at the same time how we marry up all those potential benefits with uh often significant cyber security considerations as you get more day here out there day year is a security risk
and how do we balance off the two which is an interesting question I think yes it's an awful lot going on on in there that we need to unpack so you talked about not just cyber security but also like managing things and reducing risk and making things safer and doing things more efficiently I can see that that's part of what industry 4.0 would do but I can also see that it would create a lot of work because it's about changing how an industry has been around for what 70
years now yep it's changing how you guys do things compared to what you've always done from going back to the 1950s absolutely and has anyone listening who works in the industry will understand we have a tendency to try and keep things simple and proven and as we move in the industry 4.0 and the opportunities and technologies that brings with it it's all very much new stuff new technology which brings with its own challenges for our people yeah I have some understanding of what that entails how
do you prove that you're still doing it as safely and as correctly as you were doing it previously given the 70 years of knowledge you've accumulated and equally people are used to doing something a certain way and we're asking them to do something different to how they've always done it they're seeing films and likes that talk about the fear of the unknown and this is very much a fear of the unknown because of the risk that comes with moving into that new territory I think come across this as
well in my job I think it's less conservative in that sense because the safety around nuclear is both to people and also National Security but I definitely have come across trying to change the way things are done on a manufacturing site there's some cases where they have really old piece of Kit and if they turn it off it might not start up again because it it just has to keep running and that's all they've ever done I started using data to put a cost to it so they can kind of weigh up the
benefit of keep using that piece of kit for whatever process or to abandon it maybe replace it and I feel there's something more fundamental in there like for example I don't want to change that I walk to the shops because it's the way I've always walked why I walk a different route I like doing what I've done I can make loads of things in my own life where I don't want to change what I'm doing I don't want to buy a new smartphone because I have to really learn how to use it and this one might
be starting to break I've broken the screens several times but I'm now proud of the fact that I've been using a broken phone few years wow it reduces my waist footprint right I don't have to buy a new phone and there's quite a lot of environmental costs associated with buying new electronics yes so it's slightly broken but it still works so I'm gonna keep using it I quite like trying these things I do like going oh well I've been down this road I want to see what's the other Road like and it's
just a really small minor change and probably looks like the other road but I've just gotta find out there's that learning curve isn't there like so I think an example of technology that I think is easy to adopt is uh chicken pin for paying for things using your cards I had no problem picking that up because it made things easier and I was also here lots of things around me that were using it and it was just sort of natural to progress that way but having to go
out and buy a new thing because I've broken the old thing and then learn how to use that doesn't appeal to me we should probably Define what industry 4.0 is I supervise some master students last year that were working on this and one of them said to me that there are over 100 definitions of Industry 4.0 wow yeah for the purposes of your dissertation please define what it is succinctly how are you going to use that definition so Antonia you said you found people kept
mentioning things that seemed relevant to you did you come up with a good definition of Industry 4.0 I think there's common themes that I'd say fit into the definition but uh maybe it also is a you have to understand what's the difference between 4.0 and the industrial revolutions that preceded it I guess some of the key themes I saw were Big Data another word to Define what is Big Data rather than just normal data cloud computing autonomous automation as opposed to regular
automation so we're going to Define this buzzword using or the buzzword yeah it's a collection of buzzwords I think we alluded to this earlier it is a collection of sort of new technologies when I was reading up on it it was talking about things like internet of things which is a great undefined Waffle Love Yes what's things so you've got an internet and you've got things and I'm still stuck a little bit in the early 2000s despite being somewhat techno friendly but having things in your house
like your smart lights and your smart fridge any smart washing machines sort of comes to internet of things all those sorts of things in an industrial set and having loads of processes that will talk to each other and control each other which certainly as an engineer appeals for some Modern chemical facilities because you can control them autonomously with minimal human interaction oil and gas refineries being a good example of that where you've got miles and miles of plant to run and you
can do it all from one control room with oversight from a person and I know that security is really important to that as well because you know if you are transmitting how a plant runs and if it is critical then you don't want someone to be able to hack into it or hold your data or controls hostage I know some facilities that haven't adopted remote controls because it's a security risk for them so they control it on site so during covid that was not really an option
for them to operate from there or they operate on their own rather than sending it home I feel like you've just set out a plot point for like several different action movies or some some hostile entity takes over some industrial plan either by controlling its autonomous features or putting a load of people in there or maybe churning out something nefarious for their own devices but they're doing it remotely you don't know why they're penguin just popping up out of your Plastic Machine spamming
Penguins through your extruders and you're like why penguins almost sounds like the unwritten plot feature of the Terminator series how to build a load of t100s autonomously and remotely [Laughter] succinct phrase so we're talking about it was um instantaneous communication between machines so I think Matt you alluded to yeah and um having a flexibility in being able to do updates in real time so am I saying the terminate machines can sort of build themselves machines can kind of look at
back at themselves and say well I can improve that by doing this and now I've collected all these this data and I've analyzed it I know that this is the next thing to do to improve further so it's just kind of big feedback mechanism where things can make themselves smarter that also sounds like the start of a film I'm sure there's a good sci-fi film that covers that somewhere yeah they're talking about autonomously being able to improve something that is where it
differs from our current industrial uh Revolution the digital age because we have programs and controllers that can react to things but only if we've set the parameters so say you know we've set a level alarm if the level goes above this you send an alarm and you might stop filling that tank but without us telling that it wouldn't have known to stop filling the tank it only knows that because we told it to so I guess the next step would be for it to know what level means and what it should do in
that case it doesn't need to adjust that maximum level based on some other data from elsewhere in the plan yeah the plant I feel like we should be careful with that word manufacturing floor I think you said before we started this recording I'm telling you yeah or even Factory shop shop floor oh yeah and it's the fourth Industrial Revolution because there are being three others although we can only only tend to talk about one and Tony you mentioned the last one was sort of um
Automation and the inclusion the ability to use Electronics to do things and some definitions also say it involves the age of nuclear energy and space exploration and renewable energy sources quite a lot of the definitions seem to go back to energy sources I don't know if you come across that I'm telling you working in the energy industry ironically not I don't know if that's because I I just blanked it and overlooked it because I didn't I thought yeah duh we need
renewable energy maybe they're maybe they're coming at industry 4.0 from a different slant you know and energy is still electricity coming through cables and and whatnot yeah you're not going to get more energy or more electricity out of the thing and how many more sources do we need the first Revolution was mechanization at the end of the 18th century for completeness of the picture there and the second one was about mass production and also new sources of energy I suppose
some of the old definitions of the industries did include sort of us discovering coal and then turning Steam and electricity so okay fair enough maybe there was a reason for this I'm just back peddling as I learn more information put the facts together so yeah mechanization kind of went hand in hand with steam power and then mass production seemed to come along at the same time as electricity being a thing and then gas and oil being sources as well so you can have internal combustion
engines things like that that is probably the most rambling history the different industrial revolutions anyone's ever come across yeah we're not a History Podcast I suppose now that we've sort of figured out what they are I guess the question is well what does industry 4.0 mean for which Industries what are we talking about her so we've obviously got the energy industry that you both work in to some extent but I also wonder if we're talking about intelligent use of data
what does that mean for things like farming or transport or construction projects in general yeah I mean from for me it's LinkedIn all that data together and you know for you know farming's probably a good example you tend to think of it as traditional tractors and the likes but if you start to automate and network instead of having person on track to driving around you suddenly have a load of robotic autonomous devices going around I reflect back a little bit on last summer I I had the
opportunity to go to a local Winery um in Norfolk where my parents live and uh they're talking there about how they hand um tend all the vines because they do that because it's better than doing it in a automated fashion with machines going down as mass producing but there's a a third option here with autonomous devices in that you can simulate what the people do sort of the Hands-On type effect with large numbers of automated devices that take that feedback just the idea of like loads of
autonomous missions in it could easily be with that feedback of where everyone else is so I've seen online some you know smart warehouses where they have uh grocery picking and they use robots that have clever plotting of where everything is but also plotting where other machines are so they don't Collide yeah I imagine everything's gonna kind of become like that if we do go down that way yeah I also imagine that so if you've got AI predicting the weather and you fed that into your your model of
your farm you can figure out when it's best to sow seeds when it's best to do a harvest you can have sensors in the soil detecting different nutrient levels uh looking at what bacteria you're doing in this oil in control if you wanted to control things much more carefully than we currently do now there might be an argument to not do that because you could say that might harm biodiversity maybe you feed that into your model but it could be useful rather than looking at the symptoms you
actually can see the root cause of wrinkles of why might your plant become plants I can't talk now I should not have introduced the topic of farming should I no um no it's fine um it's back on track you could actually see why might these plants potentially yellow before they do because you've got sensors on nutrient level water level it could solve it before it becomes a problem so yeah more data could be very powerful and equally allow you to control someone as a biodiversity for
the betterment of both the wider plant and animal life and indeed the crop yields so if you don't well more efficiently they'd be more land available that you wouldn't necessarily manage yeah and you might introduce more bees for example which can then pollinate the crop spare what the bees do how far do you take this that's what I'm thinking do you control all the nature or do you draw a limit so having had some wild speculation about what can farming do I think we
should maybe bring it a bit more back down to earth and uh Matt could you tell us a bit more about what's going on in the nuclear industry we're starting to introduce um various autonomous devices for surveillance of facilities so areas that aren't easily accessible by people so we're starting to deploy things like the spot the dog that you probably will see into non-accessible areas send them in do surveys and get an understanding of the area and that's then allowing us to
formulate virtual reality environments so we can understand how we can decommission facilities in a safe and effective Manner and also cost effective manner so we're looking at it from all angles there then I think there's some interesting questions of where do we take that next could we start using this data to formulate the decommissioning strategy for the plan or building or facility that says your most efficient way of taking it down is to do this this and this and you can do that
using those tools that then taking that feedback as you start to decommission there's also all the data that we collect around operations of the plant and Press air or chemical facilities that can allow us to control those facilities it's then taking that balance of how do we do that with the cyber security envelope and trying to work through both of those especially as we look at technology advance and then it's becoming more smart in terms of the equipment and less
dumb I'll feed that in as the technical terms there smart and dub instrumentation so at the minute it's very much about going into an area that people maybe wouldn't tend to go into because it'd be a bit more hazardous and then bringing that information back for late processing and being a build up virtual reality environments uh those places that people probably have not gone for 50 or 60 years so that they can understand what those areas look like and then you can formulate how you get
into those areas and take them apart that's not sound quite fantastic that there are places that people have built that they haven't been into in such a long time and now there's kind of this this impetus to do it so that we can sort of I don't know I was going to say start again that's not quite right sort of evolve the industry yeah and improve what started out 70 years ago so there'll be a birth of a brand new nuclear industry that's really smart and automated and lean and has all these
buzzwords absolutely and move on from some areas that were very much post-second World War era facilities and Cutting Edge in modern at the time which by today's standards have very much shown their age I mean this sounds really obvious maybe to someone in the industry but how does it become so outdated like why would it not be updated in the first place to make sure it's on that edge because nuclear was such a leading technology why is there the Trope that the industry is decades
behind most of if not all of it is because we have something that is proven to work it's proven to be safe in its working and to make the justification that the new thing is safe takes a a lot of work to prove the same levels of safety or better levels of safety and we do evolve some stuff but it's a slow process to get that done so we try and stick as far as we can with what's proven and known there's a balance in there as well because at the level of review we have to go to to prove those
technologies that takes a lot of money a lot of resources to do that from a taxpayer cost efficiency point of view in the decommissioning sector particularly we're trying to optimize what we do to give best value to the taxpayer so we wouldn't want to necessarily go and upgrade everything because it very much feeds into some of the discussions that we do see on nuclear of it's so expensive and part of the reason for it being so expensive when you're talking particularly new
build reactors for example is because those designs have been continuously evolved and updated so if you look at the power programs of previous generations the main nox reactors are a great example of this no two Magnus reactive stations pretty much are identical every design was different that's because we were evolving the designs as we built them but the difficulty with that is that then because those designs evolved as we built them the cost changed each time
you got first of a type cost with every single reactor angry Point C today is probably another good example the costs of that are relatively high if and when size well C is built that will be cheaper than Hinckley Point C because it will not be a first of a Kind so these are the two new reactors that are either being built or about to be built that this is going to kick off this new Renaissance of the nuclear industry absolutely Hinckley c will be designing out many of the
challenges that size will be will then already have ironed out as it goes in the construction and I also suspect that the original reactors the fleet that sort of I think building finished in was it the 70s or 80s probably the AGR Fleet so second generation I I suspect they may not have been built with decommissioning in mind they were just thinking about power production and then the industry said well hang on a second we need to take these things apart at some point so if
we're going to build new ones we should think about that now they might run for 100 years maybe seeing as the current fleets run for 50 or 60 and new ones you think could be running for longer absolutely and that's very much reminiscent of all the challenges we've got at sellerfield is that all of those facilities were built in the post-war era some of them were built for military purposes decommissioning was not a consideration and even as we start to get into the early power generation
Fleet macnox and AGR reactors absolutely the thought was how do we get them generating electricity and not how do we take them apart size will be is probably the only reactor that was designed explicitly with the thoughts of decommissioning in mind and that's because it's the newest one on the grid most of what I've done with the nuclear industry has been about decommissioning and waste management and doing things in this like really holistic approach um I know industry 4.0 is something
government is interested in for the nuclear industry in particular because you've got all of these huge technical Specialists working on different aspects of the nuclear industry and you need to have that holistic view of it in the industry 4.0 can really help there where you sort of collect all these data sets and you have all these sensors where you might never have had sensors before and you learn more about the power plant that you're running with this incredibly
Long View in mind especially bearing in mind if they are going to run for 100 years you need to have some way of retaining knowledge and digitization can help with that so there's this this kind of grand plan to have all of these bits of Technology talking to each other without compromising security which will be a real challenge I think data management is is super informed because sometimes I go somewhere and I say okay how does this piece of equipment run compared to what it was specified and
designed for and it might have been very long five ten years and they'll go I don't know I can only imagine the scale that that happens in nuclear industry if there wasn't this record keeping would be even bigger because it runs for decades even almost lifetimes you know you can't have you can't you won't even have the same Engineers working there the other big challenge with data management we see even now with our it systems that we're using here here and now the it moves on
at such a pace that it's hard to keep up do your formats change software applications change the underpinning um operating systems change and what we were running five ten years ago isn't compatible now with what we run today yeah and wait for my 10 year old computer to decide that windows will not support it anymore I'm already at the point where windows are saying you know this is quite slow right you won't be able to upgrade to the next iteration of Windows yeah I know but again electronic
waste yeah I I was reading something the other day at Microsoft uh Windows 10 which most of us are probably running now and that goes out support in a couple of years with some of the big projects in Industry the lead time to get say a new operating system based software package um in can be nearly as long as the lifespan of that operating system so you're just bringing it in as that operating system goes out of support by the manufacturer wow so the first challenge Peer Industry is to find
me to bring in for uh that have some benefits but equally it brings its own challenges so you've still got Hardware compatibility as Hardware standards change so would your underlying Linux system run on today's AMD chips for example or Intel chips and would it run on the ones in five years time while the software is still compatible with the operating system it's a fair point you're not going to bring it all in-house I guess and Technology seems to be evolving a
faster and faster rate yeah is that something you come across Antonia in your sector and do you have any other good examples you mentioned Big Data earlier on and said well what do we mean by Big Data yeah I was I was um thinking about this and and sort of started looking around IBM found this interesting stat that one terabyte of production data is created daily by the average Factory but less than one percent is analyzed and for sure I think that can definitely happen because at
the moment the way we operate create things is we try to keep it running and so you have controls and that does have information it processes it and thinks okay because it it wants this target it will adjust these you know open these valves to achieve that but we we don't tap into that data because we know the temperature so we actually can infer other things from it such as you know how much energy is being used there so um definitely I see this now where you
know we get building management systems or BMS or plant controls having also monitoring systems so you can understand how energy is being used and then all controlled and then take from that actions to reduce it and make it more efficient um so it's definitely on the rise and then eventually you might get systems which can decide that for themselves but at the moment it's still semi-manual where you've got the data collecting but who who looks at it and who chooses what to do with it
hmm yeah that's one of the things um that I've come across all a few years ago I helped edit a peer-reviewed paper about the use of digital twin as an example use case for the nuclear industry so someone created a framework that could be used to make a digital twin of a nuclear power plant say and I have to Define what digital twin is I know and they were talking about all these different things and how yes you you probably will want people interacting with it at some point but you can sort
of choose when that isn't Optimizer and the the framework they came up with on their test cases made it a lot more efficient without sacrificing accuracy of um the part of the plant that it was modeling and so I say digital twin there's also some contention around what the definition of a digital twin is and some some say you need to go and model every single atom in your object or device or manufacturing plans or whatever it is some say that's unnecessary that's a ridiculous amount
of data you don't need to go no no I agree but yeah what is the information that you need and how do you need to use it and there are different ways of Designing the digital twin to do what you need and no more than that so when you're talking about a terabyte of data generated a day from a manufacturing plant but you can infer things from just the temperature say that suggests you don't necessarily need to collect all of that data and analyze it if the temperature tells you something else
about what's going on in the plant and fair enough so it was about digitizing intelligence or experience gained by people as well for me almost again going back to science versus engineering I feel like a scientist would say we need to understand how every atom works we need to understand the underlying theory about why it does that and then engineer would go well I observed this so I'm going to create this correlation and this is how it operates so now we know how to predict
it we don't know why it just does it and it's just that I'll learn from experience you go well this is the end result up so we'll just use that and as I'll often chime in with with things like that and go well we've done 90 of the work we're reasonably sure this is how it does something that's good enough but I don't need 100 certainty 90 along with intuition and experience is good enough for me to make a decision oh I don't know but that's what I'm part of it is about
digitizing that experience as you say so somewhere someone will have written well the reason that we're doing this with the data over here is because when we looked at the atoms it told us this and I guess difference between a purist wanting to understand why something does something um of against a practical person that thinks yeah I I know enough I'll get on to the next thing that I need to sort yeah you do kind of have to really any way your priorities and what's where's
the next fire that I need to fight and hopefully at some point industry 4.0 video and then you know who knocks on what I was thinking about what would I want from industry 4.0 in my own life I want a house that maintains itself it knows that the render on the wall is starting to fall off outside and it also knows because it's been connected to the internet and it's been keeping track of the latest advancements it knows what to buy to have really fancy new render that will last longer and be more
weatherproof and keep my house warmer because it's waterproof and the walls don't get us down but there is also this argument about AI artificial intelligence but it's created by us to start with so we already have our own bias so what if you get the wall render AI program that only looks at a certain brand of render and actually they just promote whatever they want you to buy and actually it might not be the best because it's not got that whole data set so you're almost at the mercy
of whoever makes that program or AI fair enough I like how when we get to the speculation of what would I want in my life I'm the one that comes up with something really altruistic and the engineers but what about this really practical thing that humans do money makes the world turn yeah that was an advert or was it a washing machine that had a button that it would automatically buy detergent but it would only buy a particular brand of detergents oh just that looked at it and
thought I don't want that I'd like to have the options and do a bit of research into it and decide what I want but it comes to house maintenance that a little bit more outside of my expertise and I don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time looking into all these Technologies I just want my house to buy stuff and get some robots in to do that I mean I don't mind as a self-cleaning house and that's the limit it's not allowed to buy any cleaning products though do you have to restock it maybe
it gives me an alert that is out and then I can choose from my unless I set my own favorites you know then I've made a choice about which ones I wanted to begin with yeah so you're going with the human intervention side of Industry 4.0 you want to interact with it I just wanted to get stuff done I guess I want it to do the boring stuff and then I still have control fair enough so the idea is it it frees you up to other things right yeah and you can have as much control as you want
or don't want yeah you can have different models of it why not possibly a good example of Industry 4.0 that is becoming realized now it's probably self-driving cars you're having cars anyway have way more sensors than they used to right I always tells us when the tire pressure is getting low didn't tell us that there was a nail in the tire so you still need to do your checks you still need to check tread but it's getting there right and I would quite like a self-driving car as well because
I don't enjoy driving I also wouldn't mind because again it freezes up to do something else exactly you can you can do some work or if you can read a book or have a nap at least once we get over the whole who's in control of the car question yeah [Applause] true driving app it's in some sort of three-way Collision what makes a decision about who to protect yeah on combine roads how does it even know where the edge of the road is how does it know where to scooch into
a hedge to pass an oncoming car because the road isn't wide enough but they're really tangible examples of seeing how the technology can evolve and help us in what industry 4.0 is yeah um I don't think I ever Define what big data was oh yeah we got distracted in the final few minutes did you have a definition of it well Big Data was the difference between data regular and having lots of data quickly generated and processed again it doesn't really Define how much is a lot but you just
know if you have a lot then it's big data I guess if you've had a sudden I guess step change in how much data you're producing or how much you need it's much bigger than before it's not an incremental change this is a huge leap maybe this is my Engineers understanding of Big Data simplified yeah whereas a scientist would come up with a definite number and an error hey there's an error in engineering as well it's just a very big error yeah tolerance I agree with
that we agree on something hey hey I think that's a great place to leave it we're just kind of trying to come up with definitions that don't really exist which sums up industry 4.0 quite well I think so hopefully if you're still listening to this you've gain some insight into what industry 4.0 is beyond it being a bit of a woolly definition of something so I think that's a good point to join the conversation to a close and we will see you next time thanks everyone thanks bye
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