Smart ecosystem: the robot factory

More power and control for the companies? There you have the robots to create a smart ecosystem, sustainable and efficient.

Challenge toward the convergence IT and OT

Until few months ago, the information technology (IT) and the operative technology (OT/operations) worked separatelly.

Basically, for IT one means the company informatic, which is usually used to manage the administrative and managerial processes.

They are computers, softwares, networks and communications, that form the data bases and the informatic safety, besides the knownledge of the managerial problems, obviusly.

The OT world is more complex and varied because it includes the management and the control of all the technology used for the production, the company movements and the distribution.

The occasion of interaction are rare and limited mostly to some occasion of maintenance or failures.

Today, the fast development of the informatic systems and of the communications are creating on the production systems an effect similar to the one realized by the introduction of the smartphone on the marketplace.

We are arriving to the convergence of manu channels into an instrument.

The application of the systems of information technology to the operation technology will bring to a higher efficiency, a decreasing of the costs and an increasing of the competitivity.

So, the company is becoming a real smart ecosystem by creating a physiological and continuos relationship between the human resources.

The company as smart ecosystem

This inevitable convergence between the IT and OT started already in the ’80s. The idea was the one to obtain real-time benefits by using technologies available from the factory automation.

For this reason in the production one shortly added informatic systems for the management and the control of the physical systems and the data acquisition.

The keyword became connectivity. These systems manage the monitoring and the control of many processes and operations, from the supply of gas and electricity, to the control of the transport system.

Especially it’s good to talk about the systems SCADA, that allow a remote control thanks to the network technology, but that don’t ensure the data acquisition and transmission in real-time of the most sensitive points of the production process.

For this reason these systems were sided with robotic systems. And so there you have that the company is becoming a smart ecosystem, the robots start to be the actors of the productive process.

Introduction to the robotic in the company

The introduction of the advanced robotic and of the development of the smart sensors connected with broadband wireless networks are allowing the birth of “smart factories” which are able to reduce the fault-detection media.

But not only. These “robots factories” reduce the material and components wastage, by quickly changing the production lines according to the changes of the market and by reducing the delivery times.

Therefore the differences between the many human resources that work in the company as OT and IT are decreasing thanks to the usage of the robotic technology and of the platforms of data sharing used.

The factory becomes a single smart eco system, sustainable and efficient. The only problem to keep under control is the vulnerability to the external attacks.

How does this smart ecosystem work?

One of the main thing that pushes toward the convergency is the ever higher informatization and automatization of all the physical processes.

All the functions are getting optimazed with big flexibility, by reaching high levels of efficiency. Meanwhile it produces even a huge quantity of datas to manage. That’s why it is a vulnerable system.

So how does this smart ecosystem work? First of all, we need to store all the datas in safe systems of storage.

The idea is the one to make them easily recoverable and analyzable. Now, the problem is that these datas came from varied sources and so characterized by formats and standards which are often incompatible.

The robots will analyze the company datas

It’s used to develop the systems which are able to integrate and to understand this growing quantity of datas so to take something useful to address the decisional and planning processes.

One needs programs able to analizy all the inputs about the productive processes by answering to specific requests through reports and dashboards so to optimaze the supply chain and the store.

Nothing very new, but always more hard because of the technological complexity of the products. The modern marketplaces are volatile and the first need for the company is to react with the maximum quick to the challenges of the competitor.

The robots will be for this the breakthrough. They will upgrade in real time all the informations about the interaction with the external world, by bringing marketing, finance, suppliers and logistic to cooperate.

This post is also available in: Italiano