Digital twins in manufacturing & warehousing
Industrial IOT in manufacturing, warehousing, and healthcare industries are deemed to be one of the key factors in driving the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 as we call it. Nowadays to monitor social distancing in order to avoid infections. Often the promise made by the vendor is that by building digital representations of physical assets, indoor inventory and shop floor processes additional insights will be derived from large data sets to drive new information insights and revenue opportunities, increased efficiencies or ROI driven opportunities identified by our consultant.
Digital twins – digital technology & visual representation of the operations.
In an industrial production environment, it means the operations on the production floor which are depicted by zones of moving objects in order to create a digital twin, data needs to be gathered from different operations on the shop floor functions and moving objects effectively mapped in real-time. Without data, the visual representation is only a hollow concept. The question is how to build more of a twin and less of a hollow concept?
This boils down to several factors; some are organizational and operational, whilst others are to do with technology and availability of know-how. The latter in my view is one of the biggest hurdles, but it is not independent of the technology or ecosystem of choice. At RipplesIOT, we believe in open source technology and open API based democratizing access to machine-generated data to implement digital twins in the manufacturing & warehousing industries.
Monitoring workflow & workplace safety
The digital twin concept can also be extended to monitoring social distancing in hospitals, offices, coworking spaces, etc. Given an accuracy of 5 sq meters, it is possible to ascertain the time spent by a group of people to trigger health safety alerts.
Industry 4.0 solutions
This means that the cost structure of the industry 4.0 solution will be appropriate, and accessible for a larger, global audience. Many of the prevailing IOT connectivity protocols incur huge expenses in the bill of material by using out-dated and proprietary radio HW and or transmission protocols.
Another important deployment aspect for consideration is the installation time and effort to configure your digital twins in manufacturing and warehousing. This has a direct impact on savings and can offer a large cost component in any industrial IOT project for factories, warehouses, and construction industries. Our Wirepas enabled massive mesh network topology is truly self-organizing and totally autonomous.
Algorithms running in each Bluetooth radio decide how best to organize the network, it’s topology, and the use of radio spectrum. This eliminates network planning, reduces installation time and most importantly, the deployment can be a simple part of daily routines by factory workers saving a lot of time and effort in installation, implementation, cabling, inspection, and certification. Health monitoring solutions also improve workplace safety.
Call us to know how to implement indoor inventory tracking, shopfloor monitoring Digital Twins in your organization.
