A roadmap to revolutionizing Industry 4.0

Industry 3.0 was in itself a huge advancement over the previous versions, as it involved the emergence of the computer as and when automation started to rule the industrial scenario completely. During this period, the transformation led to the inclusion of innumerable robots into the assembly line where they performed all sorts of humane tasks like that of Programmable Logic Controllers. With the advent of Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Era of Industry, came in the evolution of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). CPS is comprised of smart devices and storage mechanisms which allow the exchange of information independently. CPS also activates the task performed while regulating the other tasks autonomously. This information exchange involves a technology called the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), wherein multiple sensors can work simultaneously and transfer the information to some Cloud server which further analyzes the data after developing some prognosticative models based on the data received. This process helps in the manufacturing of products, supply chain, as well as the management of materials by the industries. Newswire has successfully predicted that the Industry 4.0 will globally reach $214B by the year 2023.

The transformation from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 was a boon as the autonomous working of various machines without human interference, was definitely the need of the hour. The Industry 3.0 had all its machines self-regulated. For instance, previously, the basis of the industry depended upon robots to do a task put up by humans on the assembly line. These last stage old machineries can be ameliorated to those of the Industry 4.0 version, simply by allowing the exchange of data with the aid of some sensors and IIOT. The adoption to Industry 4.0 can be clearly understood with the following illustration.

Credits: https://www.slideshare.net/vegamco/vegam-solutions

The Smartphone and Bluetooth innovation

Some innovative minds came together to aggregate two or more technologies to make happen a miracle. Selvan VMS and Ranjith Mukundan are the revolutionaries who made this possible. In today’s time, every company expects their customers to be on one track using a multitude of devices while regulating each of them singly. For the customers to be able to bring the IoT into their lives and thus homes, they need the allowance to easily control everything with just a touch; keeping in mind the factor of affordability. This has been made possible by Bluetooth technology and the most widely used device of all times, a smartphone.

There are many profound user-oriented IoT startups that allow the provision of communication abilities through the individuals’ smartphones. The potential of both IoT and mobile telecommunications is remarkable. The companies are working to converge these two techniques to bring forth a revolution. This confluence will allow the utilization of IoT power through a simple tap on the mobile. These organizations didn’t stop at just these two technologies. They also brought in the use of Bluetooth in their projects because of its easy usability, low energy consumption and above all, its user accessibility. The three most profound aspects of this innovation are cited below.

• Energy Efficiency: As a low power substitute; devices using the Bluetooth technology can be operated for years even while surviving on a coin size battery. Additionally, the advancement of mesh-networking helps extend the battery range, keeping the power consumption constant.

• Compatibility: With time, the percentage of devices with this Bluetooth innovation in IoT is increasing globally. The customers are at gain as they can make their own IoT worlds with just a single app in a smart hub, along with the ability to control them with any smartphone.

• Location: The Bluetooth innovation will soon start allowing the customers utilize their accurate indoor locations, thereby, making their homes smart. This will benefit not just the customers but also the businesses providing the technology. The exact locations of the consumers will be easily traceable, thus helping the marketing team understand their interests and congregation points.

Challenges

The bottlenecks of the IoT industry which need to be worked upon at the earliest are listed below.

• Standards: There is a serious challenge in the handling of unstructured data. While the structured ones get queried through SQL while being stored in different relational databases, the unstructured information is stocked in the NoSQL databases without any standard approach of being queried. Additionally, there is a noticeable shortage of technical skills and talents which makes it hard for the companies to execute their plans and maintain their systems. Hereby, they fail to benefit from the Big-Data tools.

• Intelligent Analytics: The shortcomings in the information base or the model lead to anomalies in the analysis. The aberrations, alongside the deficiency of statistics, lead to incorrect inferences, further causing algorithmic restrictions. Most IoT businesses generate unstructured data which is unfortunately very easy to be handled by the legacy mechanisms. These systems generally use traditional analytics software which helps them track real-time information by loading the data in a batch first, and then analyzing and processing it.

• Technical Actions: The most prominent intelligent action problems faced in IoT are due to the interoperability of the devices; their reaction to unforeseeable cases; the safety of valuable information; adoption of the newer advancements; and mean-reversion done by humans.

The Ultimate Panacea

The way forward has always been visible by overcoming the bottlenecks of any innovation. The plausible solutions to the aforementioned challenges are cited below.

• The network, communication, and data-summation protocols which constitute the basic technology standards; are actually nothing but the result of proper management, processing and handling of the sensor data. All these activities aggregate to increase in the scope and frequency of the information to be analyzed, thereby enhancing the value further .

• Usage of large data sets can overcome the problems of AI models. Some analytics tools like CEP (Complex Event Processing) allow timely decision making, thereby, helping with real-time data analysis. Crowdsourcing based on the cloud is also causing growth in IoT’s intelligent analytics.

• The operational problems are being solved as the device prices are decreasing with an increase in their functionality. Today’s era is also seeing the development of some deep learning tools which influence human actions with the aid of behavioral-science reasoning.

The IoT Future

The ongoing advancements suggest that the coming days will bring about systematic, budgeted, and easy-to-use solutions for home automation which will pave the way for controlling livelihoods with just a tap. With the inclusion of smartphones and the Bluetooth technology, the advantages of IoT will start to impact everyone significantly on a daily basis. And when this happens, all the businesses and customers will at once be able to leverage out from the new IoT era.