Emerging Technologies in Process Industries
Published on : Monday 07-12-2020
Ranjan Sharma presents a brief overview of emerging technologies applying to process industries and beyond.
This article is about emerging technologies in process industries, so it would be pertinent to first understand what these terms mean or represent.
Emerging Technologies
As defined in Wikipedia, “Emerging technologies are technologies whose development, practical applications, or both are still largely unrealised, such that they are figuratively emerging into prominence from a background of nonexistence or obscurity. These technologies are new and are often perceived as capable of changing the status quo.”
With research, advancement of computing, storage and the era of I4.0 many earlier underdeveloped potentials are also able to see the light of the day now. This does add on to the encouragement of the discovery phase that most industries seek today.
Note, that these technologies are allies and not the very purpose of driving the business needs. Many of these emerging technologies have already found a place in the industry. The rest are said to hold big possibilities and promises.
This article shall cover some of the emerging technologies at a higher-level narrating what they are.
Process Industry
As defined by IISE, “Process industries are those industries where the primary production processes are either continuous or occur on a batch of materials that is indistinguishable.” Examples of the process industries include food, beverages, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, ceramics, base metals, coal, plastics, rubber, textiles, tobacco, wood and wood products, paper and paper products, etc.
As one may realise the main play here is in the mix of input materials to get the desired characteristic in the output, intermediatory or final. Hence, the kind of problems being solved here might be more to do with what if scenarios, quality, behavioural and likewise analytic.
Besides this, there are several problems common to several industries like that of wastage, compliance and the way they are treated may also overlap.
This article shall talk of emerging technologies applying to process industries and beyond.
Hence the technologies being listed are generic.
Digital Thread & Digital Twin
The need of what if scenarios, several permutation and combination, behaviour analysis and a lot more make Digital Twin an ideal case for Process Industries. Digital twin in simple words is a digital replica of a physical object and is able to simulate the desired behaviour of the physical object given the inputs. Digital twin can be based on a physics-based model or a database model or a mix of both.
As the digital twin needs all the required inputs to rightly simulate the behaviour, this can be achieved through the digital thread. The digital thread doesn’t just help knit systems but also helps define the single source of truth for a given data point.
The organisations with PLM or likewise may benefit more as this may serve as the central system for most of the data and its flow.
The evolving architectures
Cloud Native Architectures helps utilise the best of the cloud through the right architectures fulfilling the requirements and constraints that today’s tech demands. They help businesses meet tech by not just breaking the monolith but offering self-healing, smart, secure, scalable and ever evolving tech.
Message Broker and Message Queue are now native components in most of the architectures and products. The need of disparate systems to connect, scale often, manage changes makes this model work well. As the process industries are heavy on data this architecture helps and it does already come as a part of some commercially off-the-shelf applications.
5G
The picture depicts a connected ecosystem that can help or drive a person. The same scenario leads to a lot of micro and macro level fit for the manufacturing world. One such example is of the connected worker. Other examples can be in the case of brownfield projects where wireless has obvious engineering and installation advantages over wired sensors. 5G would make real time monitoring and control possible over wireless networks. The speed and benefits that 5G would bring might help scale the adoption of wireless in the industry.
Cloud and AI
Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already emergent in the computer world and are finding more space now in the manufacturing world. The age of information and the need to be able to do experiments of various kinds gives the need of this kind of platform with AI as one of its major offerings.
AI encompasses several topics like Machine Learning (ML) and analytics, Machine co-creation, Machine Vision, AR, VR, MR, RPA, Robotics, Cognitive AI and likewise.
Various challenges have also led to the break of hybrid strategies to keep the best of both worlds that is the on premise and the cloud.
Digital platforms engulfing the entire data cycles from ingestion, to processing, modelling, analysing and visualising are now majorly run on the cloud. Cloud has gained big traction on a normal use and methods of standardisation through cloud native architectures and information models are much worked upon concepts today.
Standard models as a harbinger of technology
What ERP was once at inception is how the cloud and evolving technologies are today. The problems to be solved are easily replicable across similar industries at the minimum. The tech solution perhaps at large across industries. These solutions at the minimum shall require interaction between disparate systems and perhaps only the kind of information and what is done with that may vary across industries. All this shall help give rise to small MVPs that may later evolve into small or big packaged applications aka products and standard components.
This evolution shall have tangential or direct benefits making standardisation of architecture and components at large come to real. To name a few, standardisation of information models and data connectors have already started to get in place.
Security as a concept for emerging technologies
Threats today and the penetration of IT into OT with the need for information exchange growing between the enterprise and shop floor calls for not just preventive but cognitive measures to deal with security. This means security shall be a conformance norm and a part of basic requirement in most tech specs. This brings in a shift in products and practices that the vendor offers. Some examples are instrumentation equipment, switches, packaged applications, COTS, coding practices and likewise.
This onus falls on the entire supply chain inclusive of the organisation itself. The chain affects the process and people part at the minimum and the technology comes as an ally to protect process and people and to also educate them.
The ongoing need for security being a basic requirement shall lead to various evolutions on diagnostics, sniffing and self-correcting mechanisms to name a few. Perhaps an automated system with AI as spine to help protect the Enterprise Architecture may also come to life.
This space is emerging on aspects of awareness, training, practices, tools, assessments, standards, automation, products and a lot more.
In this VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world there are complex problems to be solved and hence the above topics mentioned might be a canvas or more than that. These may also serve as a breeding ground for several other technologies and architectures to evolve and for other emerging tech like block-chain to penetrate in. This is also the place where the COTS products are shifting too.
In all, the tech can be overwhelming, nevertheless, the focus should not move away from the business problem being solved and the strategy defined for various big and small goals. Tech is an ally and the good thing is that with Industry 4.0 it brings in various possibilities to be harnessed at a reasonable cost and risk.
Ranjan Sharma is an ISA95 layer enthusiast and has had the opportunity to serve all the layers in various capacities on technical and functional front. The focus and exposure vary with respect to each layer. He richly follows and understands the growth, diversification that is coming along with I4.0 and the impact it has on these layers from various aspects like architecture, security, integration and likewise. He enjoys learning the ecosystem that comes along with it and is enthusiastic about finding means to implement it. Ranjan has served various prestigious companies like Accenture, CTS, TCS, Alfa Laval and start-ups. He likes reading, writing, playing and watching movies
