New-Tech Europe Magazine | January 2019

customized and personalized products. In such an era, the holy grail will no longer be robot- controlled mass production, but human creativity.” As such, in the smart factories of 2035, a new collaboration model will need to be put in place. A marriage, you could say, between man and machine – with robots doing the heavy mechanical labor, and with their human co-workers being the ‘creative architects’ (inventing new, custom-made products and overseeing their production in tomorrow’s factories). The question is: how can you foster a partnership between man and machine in such a setting? How do you forge an optimal pairing, so that 1 + 1 effectively becomes 3? It will all boil down to effective communication between the different parties! Digital twins for our smart factories? To give Industry 5.0 every chance of success, it will be crucial to advance communication between the different actors (humans and machines). Of course, machines already communicate with each other today. For instance, in large car factories, integrators, with the help of standardized protocols, ensure that machines (sometimes from different providers) 'know' enough about each other to meet production targets. But let us be honest: in today's factories, every machine basically does its own bit of (assembly line) work, and little real communication is needed. In the future, when machines get more autonomous and need to anticipate each other, communication will become more difficult. “For example: imagine two robots

Fig 1: From steam engine to the Internet of Things: industry has evolved at breakneck speed in the last 300 years.

factory floor are the physical result of what is happening in that virtual world. At first glance, this ‘dictator model’ seems an ideal solution to deal with complex situations on the factory floor while ensuring that production targets are met. Technically, such a scenario is already perfectly feasible: the only things you need are a fast data connection between the physical machines in the production area and the ‘virtual brain’, and a lot of processing power. There are however two caveats to this. The first is purely economic. Let us not forget that industrial settings are often complicated and competitive places where many actors collaborate (suppliers and partners – and sometimes also

approaching each other on the factory floor. In this situation, how can one robot anticipate how the other is going to move (“Will he go left or right? And what should I do…”)? And that is before taking into account the positions, actions and reactions of other robots nearby…” To manage this type of situations, you could make a digital copy (or twin) of the factory in the cloud. As such, you create a digital model of the physical factory floor; a model that continuously updates itself based on real-time sensor data; a model where all decisions (and their outcomes) are simulated in real time. In this scenario, all authority is hosted at a central location from which all instructions depart. And the robots and machines on the

New-Tech Magazine Europe l 19