Combined with human-centric and data-driven decisionmaking, advanced manufacturing technologies can help improve productivity, eco-efficiency, agility, supply chain resilience and speed to market as well as customercentricity.
Predictive Maintenance and Quality Control
Manufacturers can deploy AI and ML for predictive maintenance, which detects and alerts manufacturers to potential failures in their equipment. AI and ML algorithms also support quality control and can provide insights into process optimisation to make the manufacturing process more efficient.
Products that require visual inspection are usually inspected by humans on the manufacturing line. Yet, as product demands and timeline speeds have increased, it becomes more difficult for the
Manufacturers can deploy AI and ML for predictive maintenance, which detects and alerts manufacturers to potential failures in their equipment.
human eye to detect anomalies. In electronics manufacturing for example, printed circuit boards( PCBs) can be highly complex with hundreds, or even thousands of parts that are difficult for the eye to see.
For greater accuracy at speed, AI is used to accurately validate components and their placement during high speed PCBA production, improving production quality and avoiding problems later in the product testing phase.
Challenges and Future Success
Organisations need to identify the right use cases for the business, find relevant data, process it, and then develop, fine-tune, and eventually deploy models. These steps all take time, but they are vital to reaping the greatest benefits.
Of course, there are still challenges ahead, from data readiness- where the quality of an AI / ML model is only as good as the training data- to quantifying the return on investment of AI / ML implementations.
Manufacturers today are successfully using AI and ML in certain areas of their manufacturing processes, and while hurdles remain, advanced technologies are at the forefront of Industry 4.0 and have the power to transform production and operations on every level.
Issue 74 PECM 7