Practical View on the Role of the PI System in Industry 4.0+ and AI for Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 & AI has been the talk of the town. OSIsoft PI System infrastructure combined with the advent of “edge” and IIoT-enabled devices provide a rich set of telemetry on operational assets (manufacturing shop floor machines, manufacturing robots, AGVs, etc). I4.0 Maturity Models have now become more prevalent. We will provide a reality check on the I4.0 state-of-the-art in manufacturing. We will present successful use of machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning (known as “AI”) in manufacturing.

Industry 4.0 was first defined in Germany circa 2011, yet its adoption in North America is still relatively low, despite most companies having heard of it.

This is rather surprising given the size of the benefits available.

Particularly in North America there is a tendency to confuse IIoT with Industry 4.0, and for people to think that Industry 4.0 is purely about technology.

It is about a philosophy, a strategy if you prefer, of using data to make the right decisions.

You can start small and then build on that to using complex models and AI to make automated decisions.

For more on this see my article here.

There are many different ways a manufacturing company can benefit from Industry 4.0, some of the key ones are shown on the right, with those involving AI circled.

Maya HTT have had considerable experience applying AI/ML in various industrial circumstances and have developed and refined their processes to achieve the best results.