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Automation is an unstoppable force for change within pretty much every advanced human industry. It has already been reported that it’s having an impact on low-skilled jobs. Nonetheless, there are many other implications to automation are tremendous. The ability to gather data from distant, and often dangerous, environments without human intervention is no small feat, as is the uplifted capability to simulate and analyze factories’ digital twins in order to obtain predictive insights. A changing scenario brings about new opportunities for improvement: IIoT solutions need to be kept updated to new cyber security standards and much work can still be done to improve the benefits of such solutions. There’s clearly still a lot of work for humans to do. Researchers are needed now more than ever to create the building blocks of the automation future, one that is already here but has still a long way to go.
PS: Have you seen the chapter on Cyberphysical security for Industry 4.0 that our CTO and CEO co- wrote?
New Study Finds That Six Jobs Are Lost for Every Robot Added to the Workforce
Now, a new paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) puts an actual number to the threat of automation: each industrial robot introduced in the workforce between 1990 and 2007 coincided with the elimination of 6.2 jobs within the commuting area. Wages also saw a slight drop of between .25-.50% per 1,000 employees when one or more robots was added to their workforce.
Read the full article at Futurism.
Seeing double — digital twins & the future of IIoT
Digital twin technology has been trending in the news for quite a while, yet it should be no surprise that it’s in IIoT where the concept of a virtual representation of a physical product or system will be the most valuable. The digital twin has a natural home in the IIoT. The components of a CAD model–the design parameters, the operating state, the environment–can all be elements of the digital twin representation. Think of the twin as a body where nerve endings live in the sensors deployed on the machines. The digital twin paradigm enables manufacturers to do two things: operate factories efficiently and gain timely insights into the performance of the products manufactured in these factories.
Read the full article at Smart Industry.
Researchers and defenders needed in IIoT
The Internet of Things and IIoT are causing a lot of security headaches, mostly because these devices and the solutions used to secure them are still in the nascent stages of being developed and coming to market. Phil Neray, CyberX’s vice president of industrial cyber security, said even though the federal government has classified all of these as critical infrastructure, “The fact is that all of these devices were designed a long time ago.” With their age comes the issue that the protocols used to communicate were designed before anyone really understood the vulnerabilities in them. Neray said, “They lack many of the features we take for granted in cyber, and that leaves room for lots of zero days.”
Read more here.
That’s it for this week’s edition, don’t forget to check back next week for another News-In-Review. Also, our Twitter feed is filled with news on AM and IIoT so don’t forget to subscribe there as well!