Automation and the changing
world of manufacturing
By Simon Kampa, CEO and founder of
Senseye
P
roven in the heavily regulated
aerospace and defence industries
over 30 years ago, condition
monitoring is finally a reality for
manufacturers of all shapes, sizes and
sectors thanks to advances with Industry
4.0, automation and A.I. technology.
In the past, condition monitoring was an
exhausting, manual exercise in pattern
recognition, which relied on experts in
data analysis to take readings from the
machines, review the information they
gathered and spot the crucial signs that
a known fault might occur again in the
future. Industry 4.0 and cloud computing
now allow condition monitoring to
take place automatically on a much
greater scale. Software analyses vast
quantities of data taken from existing
machine sensors and data-lakes to
automatically diagnose failures and
provide the Remaining Useful Life (RUL)
of machinery.
30
Much like the gathering of machine data,
this analysis would have once been a
highly manual endeavour, involving teams
of expensive data scientists. More recently,
however, organisations such as Senseye
have developed intelligent software to
automate this activity.
Our data scientists have developed a series
of generic algorithms that can be applied
to any machine from any manufacturer,
and look at the data that is already being
produced. The algorithms analyse basic
diagnostics data from machine sensors
to spot small but significant variations in
vibration, pressure, temperature, torque,
electrical current and other sources that
indicate deterioration in machine health.
The A.I. then teaches itself to become
smarter and more predictive, fine-tuning
its own performance for each monitored
asset as it learns how each machine’s
characteristics and failure mods show up in
the data. Currently, the number of assets
one person can monitor is likely to vary
from between 50-100 a day.
With increasing automation, the number
of assets monitored can grow into the
thousands.
By automating 90% of the analytic tasks
that the diagnostic system engineer
performs, companies are able to address
changes in the levels of critical assets
within their organisation, without
requiring a tenfold increase in their labour
costs.
There is no doubt that the likes of Senseye
have hugely broadened the capabilities of
condition monitoring by automating the
process of data collection and analysis,
and providing usable information to the
engineers on the shop floor.
The new possibilities presented by these
technologies are now being realised.
Web: www.senseye.io/
Email: [email protected]
Tel (UK): +44 (0) 845 838 8615