Asia Pacific Metalworking Equipment News is pleased to conduct an interview with Mr. David Chia, Automation Charter Chair of the Singapore Industrial Automation Association on his views on the future of manufacturing technologies in Asia and the impact of the current trade war on the industry.
1.Could you provide an overview of the key trends that have shaped the manufacturing industry in Asia in 2018?
We see some key trends emerging this year:
2. What has been the top 3 biggest challenges in the digitalisation of manufacturing in Asia?
The biggest challenges are funding, technology standards, and talent.
3. How do you suggest that the challenges that have been mentioned above be overcome?
It will take some efforts from different stakeholders to overcome those challenges:
4. How has the trade war impacted manufacturing in Asia in 2018 and how will it continue to impact the industry in 2019?
There’s an old saying that goes where one door closes, another opens. This is true in the current trade war situation. It creates uncertainty on one hand, but it creates opportunity on another hand. We are seeing more investment flowing to other regions outside China. Closer to home, the South East Asian region seems to benefit from this trend.
5. For 2019, what will be the emerging markets and focus areas that the metalworking industry in Asia will focus on?
At the mass market stage, enterprise digitisation will penetrate deeper into the manufacturing floor. Enterprise will look to get more data from as many machines and sensors as possible. This has been happening in the past years, and we are expecting this trend to continue.
The need for data collection will force some rethinking in what goes inside the control cabinet. While traditional controllers are well known and well loved, it needs some additional components to do data collection and data sending. Additional components means additional costs and more point of failures, and a potentially bigger control cabinet. Some PC based solutions out there will be more attractive moving forward.
As well as sending data over standardised communication protocol, companies will increasingly looking to get standardised information from each machine type. This so called “information modelling” will make sense when one look into a production line today, there is hardly a “homogenous” production line containing the same machine model from the same manufacturer. In this area, the VDW has announced umati, an open and common language specifically designed for machine tools. With umati, end users can utilise the same interface to get the same data from different model of machine tools from different manufacturers. The good news is, umati is based on OPC UA.
Another focus for metalworking and CNC world will be the use of AR technologies. While still a cutting edge technology today, this technology holds a lot of promise from speeding up operators training, to helping maintenance work.
At the bleeding edge, we increasingly see a trend where suppliers are looking to implement ML directly on premise / machine. While this is on early stages, we feel that this would be the internal focus of many bleeding edge supplier
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Gartner, Inc. has revealed seven digital disruptions that organisations may not be prepared for and which CIOs may not foresee coming. These include several categories of disruption, each of which represents a significant potential for new disruptive companies and business models to emerge.
“The single largest challenge facing enterprises and technology providers today is digital disruption,” said Daryl Plummer, Vice President and Gartner Fellow. “The virtual nature of digital disruptions makes them much more difficult to deal with than past technology-triggered disruptions. CIOs must work with their business peers to pre-empt digital disruption by becoming experts at recognising, prioritising and responding to early indicators.”
Quantum Computing
Quantum computing (QC) is a type of nonclassical computing that is based on the quantum state of subatomic particles. Classic computers operate using binary bits where the bit is either 0 or 1, true or false, positive or negative. However, in QC, the bit is referred to as a quantum bit or qubit. Unlike the strictly binary bits of classic computing, qubits can represent 1 or 0 or a superposition of both partly 0 and partly 1 at the same time.
Superposition is what gives quantum computers speed and parallelism, meaning that these computers could theoretically work on millions of computations at once. Further, qubits can be linked with other qubits in a process called entanglement. When combined with superposition, quantum computers could process a massive number of possible outcomes at the same time.
“Today’s data scientists, focused on machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and data and analytics, simply cannot address some difficult and complex problems because of the compute limitations of classic computer architectures. Some of these problems could take today’s fastest supercomputers months or even years to run through a series of permutations, making it impractical to attempt,” said Mr. Plummer. “Quantum computers have the potential to run massive amounts of calculations in parallel in seconds. This potential for compute acceleration, as well as the ability to address difficult and complex problems, is what is driving so much interest from CEOs and CIOs in a variety of industries. But we must always be conscious of the hype surrounding the quantum computing model. QC is good for a specific set of problem solutions, not all general-purpose computing.”
Real-Time Language Translation
Real-time language translation could, in effect, fundamentally change communication across the globe. Devices such as translation earbuds and voice and text translation services can perform translation in real-time, breaking down language barriers with friends, family, clients and colleagues. This technology could not only disrupt intercultural language barriers, but also language translators as this role may no longer be needed.
“To prepare for this disruption, CIOs should equip employees in international jobs with experimental real-time translators to pilot streamlined communication,” said Mr. Plummer. “This will help establish multilingual disciplines to help employees work more effectively across languages.”
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is science, engineering and technology conducted at the nanoscale — 1 to 100 nanometers. The implications of this technology is that the creation of solutions involve individual atoms and molecules. Nanotech is used to create new effects in materials science, such as self-healing materials. Applications in medicine, electronics, security and manufacturing herald a world of small solutions that fill in the gaps in the macroverse in which we live.
“Nanotechnology is rapidly becoming as common a concept as many others, and yet still remains sparsely understood in its impact to the world at large,” said Mr. Plummer. “When we consider applications that begin to allow things like 3D printing at nanoscale, then it becomes possible to advance the cause of printed organic materials and even human tissue that is generated from individual stem cells. 3D bioprinting has shown promise and nanotech is helping deliver on it.”
Swarm Intelligence
Digital business will stretch conventional management methods past the breaking point. The enterprise will need to make decisions in real time about unpredictable events, based on information from many different sources (such as Internet of Things [IoT] devices) beyond the organization’s control. Humans move too slowly, stand-alone smart machines cost too much, and hyperscale architectures cannot deal with the variability. Swarm intelligence could tackle the mission at a low cost.
Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior of decentralised, self-organised systems, natural or artificial. A swarm consists of small computing elements (either physical entities or software agents) that follow simple rules for coordinating their activities. Such elements can be replicated quickly and inexpensively. Thus, a swarm can be scaled up and down easily as needs change. CIOs should start exploring the concept to scale management, especially in digital business scenarios.
Human-Machine Interfaces
Human-machine interface (HMI) offers solutions providers the opportunity to differentiate with innovative, multimodal experiences. In addition, people living with disabilities benefit from HMIs that are being adapted to their needs, including some already in use within organizations of all types. Technology will give some of these people “superabilities,” spurring people without disabilities to also employ the technology to keep up.
For example, electromyography (EMG) wearables allow current users who would be unable to do so otherwise to use smartphones and computers through the use of sensors that measure muscle activity. Muscular contraction generates electrical signals that can be measured from the skin surface. Sensors may be placed on a single part or multiple parts of the body, as appropriate to the individual. The gestures are in turn interpreted by a HMI linked to another device, such as a PC or smartphone. Wearable devices using myoelectric signals have already hit the consumer market and will continue migrating to devices intended for people with disabilities.
Software Distribution Revolution
Software procurement and acquisition is undergoing a fundamental shift. The way in which software is located, bought and updated is now in the province of the software distribution marketplace. With the continued growth of cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, IBM and others, as well as the ever-increasing introduction of cloud-oriented products and services, the role of marketplaces for selling and buying is gathering steam. The cloud platform providers realise (to varying degrees) that they must remove as much friction as possible in the buying and owning processes for both their own offerings and the offerings of their independent software vendors (ISVs) (i.e., partners). ISVs or cloud technology service providers (TSPs) recognise the need to reach large and increasingly diverse buying audiences.
“Establishing one’s own marketplace or participating as a provider in a third-party marketplace is a route to market that is becoming increasingly popular. Distributors and other third parties also see the opportunity to create strong ecosystems (and customer bases) while driving efficiencies for partners and technology service providers,” said Mr. Plummer.
Smartphone Disintermediation
The use of other devices, such as virtual personal assistants (VPAs), smartwatches and other wearables, may mean a shift in how people continue to use the smartphone.
“Smartphones are, today, critical for connections and media consumption. However, over time they will become less visible as they stay in pockets and backpacks. Instead, consumers will use a combination of voice-input and VPA technologies and other wearable devices to navigate a store or public space such as an airport or stadium without walking down the street with their eyes glued to a smartphone screen,” said Mr. Plummer.
CIOs and IT leaders should use wearability of a technology as a guiding principle and investigate and pilot wearable solutions to improve worker effectiveness, increase safety, enhance customer experiences and improve employee satisfaction.
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