FUTURE THINKING
The impact of technology on our world today would have been unthinkable a couple
of decades ago – and the technology of tomorrow is set to be even more important
BY BRIAN HOLLIDAY, MANAGING DIRECTOR, SIEMENS DIGITAL INDUSTRIES
When I was 11 years old, my teacher
set our class the task of designing a
product for the future. My design,
The Fabulous Rocketers ('blueprint'
pictured below), was a pair of hightech
roller skates with propulsion,
suspension, pea shooters, fog lights, a vent for
smells, and an aerial so I could listen to music as I
zipped along at 70mph.
Three decades (or so) on, we don’t think
anything of a Segway or an e-scooter as a means
of personal propulsion and we can choose from
a plethora of platforms to listen to music whilst
we’re on the move.
A couple of years after taking my fi rst steps in
design and engineering with my Rocketers, I also
enjoyed my fi rst experience of computing through
the family Sinclair ZX81. It boasted a Z80 processor,
1Kbyte of RAM and could manage an incredible 1
million instructions per second. It’s fair to say my
early programs didn’t stretch its capabilities, but I
fi nd it interesting to compare that home computer
to the smartphones many of us carry today. An
iPhone 11, for example, is equipped with an A13
Bionic chip which can perform 1 trillion operations
per second and is designed for artifi cial intelligence.
We have come a long way and now have some
incredible computing power at our fi ngertips.
Consider also the proliferation of smart devices.
An estimated 5.5 million new ‘things’ are being
connected to the internet every day, with projected
total estimates exceeding tens of billions of devices
The brainchild
of an 11-yearold
Brian
Holliday is not
too dissimilar
to technology
available today
billion people on the planet, the
future of the internet is already
set to be much more about
machines communicating with
each other than with people,
generating even more data than
the 2.5 quintillion bytes internet
users generate today.
With unprecedented
computing power and
connectivity, we are moving
at pace. The internet itself is
moving from being the Internet
of Things (IoT) towards the
Internet of Everything, a world
of Big Data and large-scale
distributed computing.
The way we view the
world, communicate, live,
shop, entertain ourselves, and
work, have all been disrupted
by technology, even more
signifi cantly since the pandemic.
Overnight, businesses had to
move their operations online,
and friends and family had to
adapt to new ways of socialising
to keep life as normal as possible,
in part using technology that
keeps us hyper-connected.
Companies like Amazon and
Uber have seized the digital
opportunity, while Zoom and
Microsoft dominate the world of
video conferencing.
Digital transformation is
happening in manufacturing
as well, where businesses are
accelerating investments in new
technology and thinking about
how to adapt and survive.
We’re witnessing the
Fourth Industrial Revolution,
or Industry 4.0, driven by
connected, digital technologies
that are disrupting business
models through integration and
enhanced fl exibility. The factory,
supply chain and manufacturing
services of the future will look
very diff erent.
Today, we design things
DIGITAL MANUFACTURING OCTOBER 2020
using powerful computers
and software tools that would
have seriously enhanced my
Rocketers. We now look beyond
the physical properties of a
product design to generate
virtualised insights of how
it might perform in the real
world – mitigating expensive
and extensive prototyping.
This is the start of the Digital
Twin – a virtual simulation
which extends to testing
the product, manufacturing
process and the productivity of
virtualised human operators, as
well as ergonomics and safety
factors that can be scaled up to
encompass the digital factory.
Data and human expertise
can be added to a Digital
Twin, that itself can be used
throughout the product lifecycle,
becoming a digital shadow to aid
performance optimisation in the
real world.
Siemens had the opportunity
to demonstrate (and learn more
about) Digital Twins through our
participation in the Ventilator
Challenge UK Consortium
earlier this year, in which many
excellent engineering and
manufacturing companies such
as GKN, Rolls Royce and Airbus
came together with Penlon
to help produce thousands of
ventilators for the NHS.
Engineers using our CAD/
CAM software accelerated
dramatically the design and
build of a sub-assembly factory
through digital modelling and
simulation that optimised
processes and dramatically
reduced the manufacturing
footprint to just one third of an
early conventional design.
Overall, design took around
three weeks rather than the
year-plus you would normally
allow for such a complex project.
in the near future. With close to eight
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