Common threads of industry 4.0

(bright music) - Advanced manufacturing and the industry 4.0 phenomenon that accompanies it, operate, and to some degree, get their power from three common threads that run through design to production, to supply chain to use, and to sustainment and maintenance. Those three common threads are the idea of the digital twin, the idea of the digital thread, and finally the idea of standards and data interoperability. So let's take each one in turn. What is a digital twin? This is a concept that has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years. At its most basic level, a digital twin is essentially a simulation. However, it's an incredibly precise simulation with high degrees of fidelity to the physical product in its physical environment. Imagine you have a very complex product, take for example, an airplane, and knowing that airplanes are created in factories in various parts of the world, and knowing that those airplanes are sold to airlines who provide a service to the public. Well, how do we know whether that airplane is operating the way it's supposed to? Is it using the right amount of fuel? Is its landing gear functioning correctly? Is the environmental system in the plane functioning the way it's supposed to? Is the plane overweight? Is it underweight? All of which affect the business operations of an airline. And in many cases today, the contracts, the business contracts between the company that makes the airplane and the company who flies the airplane for the public operate on terms and conditions related to performance of the airplane, not just simply purchasing the airplane as a capital asset. So this idea of a digital twin and the accompanying idea of the digital thread are increasingly important. So how does all of this connectedness, machines, information, people, how does that work in an industry 4.0 environment? Well, this is where the digital thread comes in. The digital thread is all of the data, the software tools, the network architecture, the actual servers themselves that create, store, process, and exchange information across an organization. It is essentially the infrastructure that enables us to then create that high fidelity simulation, called the digital twin. A digital twin is made up of information that is both human readable and machine interpretable. What does that mean? Well, imagine you have a three dimensional representation of that airplane, and you are trying to decide how much cargo you can put on that airplane at a particular airport, knowing that you have fuel constraints, knowing that you have takeoff or landing constraints, knowing that you are down two people on that shift because two people are on vacation. How do you aggregate all of that information? It's not just product information, it's process information. It's behavioral information about the airplane, both its materials and its processes that were used to make it. It's also business operational information, all of which is brought to bear in a context, meaning the context of that airfield, not a generic digital and virtual environment, but a digital and virtual environment that not only models the behavior of the airplane itself, but also the environment in which it operates. At its most basic level, that is what a digital twin is. And modern manufacturing companies today, especially those that make complex and complicated products, use digital twins to help them answer day-to-day business decisions. And finally, how is it that we move all of that information without error? This is critically important, but that is where having appropriate standards, adopted by at least a national community, if not an international community, around how we create the digital data that are used to drive the digital twin and the digital thread are created. Without standards about how data are created, how they can be modified, and ultimately how they can be stored and curated, our modern industry 4.0 manufacturing world will not work as effectively as it could. And in order for it to effectively work, we must have interoperability between systems, the ability to exchange information between systems without loss of precision or accuracy. (bright music)