Peter Sorowka is a recognized expert in Industrial IoT and the technical architecture of data-driven industrial production. In 2015, he founded Cybus - a software company specializing in secure and governance-strong IIoT Edge and Smart Factory solutions. As CEO of Cybus, he has been advising and guiding global enterprises towards decentralized, secure Smart Factory and data-driven Smart Services across various industries such as automotive and battery manufacturing, machinery and tool...

Had the pleasure of hosting Jim Gavigan on my latest podcast episode, where we deep-dived into "Data-Driven Optimization in Process Industries." We discussed leveraging data for efficiency, the challenges of data quality, and choosing between foundational principles and cutting-edge ML algorithms. Jim also highlighted the significance of tools and strategies in this sphere, emphasizing the urgency of digitizing domain knowledge in the face of an impending knowledge drain. Jim, is the...

By now, we're all aware of the profound impact Generative AI promises for manufacturing. Beyond just assisting engineers in application development, it equips managers with cutting-edge analytics and delivers invaluable error resolution insights to technicians, etc. - all through intuitive interactions. That's why I'm excited about Tulip Interfaces' new "Frontline Copilot" which uses LLMs for natural language interaction between operators and manufacturing systems. To truly comprehend its...

For years, manufacturers have had to navigate in relative blindness, implementing improvements on an as-needed, reactive basis. This approach, although functional, has been markedly inefficient and reactive, particularly in terms of process optimisation and asset reliability, two vital aspects of industrial operations that can profoundly impact efficiency and profitability. Digital Twins represent a transformative shift from this reactive approach to a proactive, predictive one. They...

DataOps for Digital Transformation In Manufacturing. In this episode, Kudzai Manditereza interviews Aron Semle, the CTO of Highbyte. HighByte is an industrial software company founded in 2018 with headquarters in Portland, Maine USA. The company builds solutions that address the data architecture and integration challenges created by Industry 4.0. HighByte Intelligence Hub, the company’s award-winning Industrial DataOps software, provides modeled, ready-to-use data to the Cloud using a...

As companies with industrial operations struggle to economically access data from intelligent devices located in remote and challenging environments, LoRaWAN presents itself as a cost-effective solution. With the capacity to locally integrate industrial data and transfer it via a private LoRaWAN network over vast distances, LoRaWAN simplifies protocol conversion and enhances data recovery. To learn more about the LoRaWAN for Industrial IoT applications I had a chat with Wienke Giezeman....

Digital transformation in manufacturing fundamentally involves transforming unprocessed data into valuable insights to guide business decisions through automated systems or human intervention. Consequently, implementing a well-thought-out data modelling strategy is key to successful digital transformation as it helps to express the meaning of the data to digital systems. To learn more about Data modelling for Industrial IoT in general and for Digital Twin use cases in particular, I had a...

In the face of a rapidly evolving industrial landscape, agility and innovation have emerged as core drivers of growth. It is essential for manufacturers to adapt swiftly to changes, harnessing new technologies and embracing new processes that fuel their development. But achieving this level of agility and innovation is not without its challenges.So how do organizations successfully navigate these hurdles to lay the groundwork for a meaningful digital transformation? To understand the...

In smart manufacturing, effective data collection and analysis are crucial. But to truly succeed, it's essential to integrate the coordination of personnel, equipment, and materials into the process.​For the factory worker, this would typically be through a series of digital nudges that guide their decision-making throughout the day, enabling them to work in harmony with smart machines for optimal results.​To discuss more the value and implementation of human-machine collaborative systems for...

The Node-Red project turns ten this year.🎉 And yet, its remarkable potential remains largely untapped in the industrial software domain. Having been a Node-Red user and promoter since its early days, I've observed that its preparedness for enterprise deployments is a key challenge limiting its broader adoption. To discover the most effective strategies for deploying and managing enterprise-grade Node-Red applications in Industrial IoT, I invited Nick O'Leary for a podcast conversation. As the...

Digital transformation of a manufacturing enterprise is a complex process that goes far beyond simply sending data to the cloud and implementing “predictive maintenance”. It requires a strategic architectural approach that effectively utilizes your data ecosystem to make informed decisions in real-time and drive innovation at every level of your organization. While there are various architectural approaches, the Unified Namespace (UNS) stands out as the most effective approach to achieve...

In this latest episode, I explore the capabilities of OPC UA PubSub and how it can be integrated with Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) to standardize industrial field-level data transfer. I speak with Melvin Francis, the Project Manager for OPC UA and TSN-related services at BE.services GmbH, to discuss the challenges faced in developing related applications due to the lack of ready-made OPC UA + TSN stacks or SDKs. We also delve into the value of OPC UA + TSN integration and how it can...

The Unified Namespace has countless advantages over traditional architectural approaches when it comes to IIoT implementation in manufacturing.​Some of these are:👉 More efficient communication and data sharing between different devices and systems.👉 Improved scalability due to a unified interface that is consistent across the entire enterprise network.​But how do you go actually go about building a Unified Namespace Architecture?​To gain an understanding of this, I invited David Schultz for a...

When you look around a factory, you are likely to see objects interacting with other objects. And there are specific things that each object can do. ​ It, therefore, makes sense that, in order to build autonomously reconfiguring factories, each object needs to be able to describe its capabilities to other objects so that they can interact with no human intervention. ​ OPC UA Information Modelling is an effort to enable the description of complex industrial systems through a standardised and...

Gaining competitive advantage is the main driver of innovation in nature as much as it is in technology. And the manufacturing ecosystem is no different. ​ In manufacturing, this manifests in the deployment of production automation systems on the shop floor, and enterprise planning systems on the top floor. ​ But yet, there's a grey area in between that has, for the most part, remained underutilised or wrongly implemented altogether. ​ This is where a Manufacturing Execution System (MES)...

I invited Maciek Wasiak for a podcast conversation on Predictive Analytics in Manufacturing and he delivered a masterclass. ​ Maciek is the CEO and Founder of Xpanse AI, a company that develops technology that rapidly accelerates Data Science delivery by replacing manual data science with AI-driven processing ​ Here's the outline of our conversation: ​ ✅ Xpanse AI ✅ Introduction to Predictive Analytics ✅ Real-World Data Science Use Cases in Manufacturing ✅ Semiconductor Fabrication Predictive...

Whenever you're faced with information overload on any subject matter, as is the case with many manufacturers considering Smart Manufacturing, it's important to take a step back and understand its first principles. ​ Without which it would be difficult and costly to realise the vision of Smart Manufacturing. ​ To help bring the First Principles of Smart Manufacturing to light, I invited Conrad Leiva for a podcast conversation. Conrad is the VP of Ecosystem and Workforce Development at the...

Whenever you're faced with information overload on any subject matter, as is the case with many manufacturers considering Smart Manufacturing, it's important to take a step back and understand its first principles. ​ Without which it would be difficult and costly to realise the vision of Smart Manufacturing. ​ To help bring the First Principles of Smart Manufacturing to light, I invited Conrad Leiva for a podcast conversation. Conrad is the VP of Ecosystem and Workforce Development at the...

More than anything else, the foundational power of personnel in fieldwork merely lies in the fact that we can see. ​ By extension, it makes sense that the biggest impact on industrial digital transformation will come from embedding vision in intelligent connected components. ​ More so when embedded vision and AI software are widely deployed in mobile and battery-powered field equipment. ​ To learn more about building this capability into industrial products, I invited Taylor Cooper for a chat...

Here's the thing. Containerisation is not only an IT technology, it is an advanced IT technology. And yet, it already looms on the horizon for Operations Technology. ​ And, while the technology opens up massive opportunities for optimisation and efficiency in the OT network, it demands a fundamental rethink of industrial software distribution and management. ​ To find out what this actually means for vendors, engineers, and system integrators in the industrial space, I invited Neil Cresswell...

While there may be disagreements on what data modeling, encoding, and transportation technologies to adopt for Industrial IoT, there's one aspect that's evidently being agreed upon across the board. ​ The fact that Publish-Subscribe architectures are, by far, more suitable for this new world of hyper-connectivity. ​ One implementation of such an architecture for IIoT is OPC UA PubSub, which defines a mapping of Binary and JSON encoding over an MQTT, AMQP, and UDP-based PubSub network. ​ To...

Advanced as they may be, modern analytics systems fall short of enabling the complete digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises. ​ For example, instead of only detecting symptoms of impending machine failure, what would be more valuable would be to determine the actual cause of failure. ​ Causal Machine Learning, a recent advance in ML holds the problem to solve this problem. ​ To understand how it can be applied in Digital Twins to enable complete digital transformation for...

Done right, the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises has less to do with plugging in smart objects to collect data from the factory floor. ​ Rather, it has a lot to do with laying down a reliable, secure, and scalable data processing infrastructure in such a manner that it allows you to automate your entire manufacturing business process. ​ And for engineers and architects tasked with building IIoT solutions, it involves picking the right tools for each part of your data...

By now, It's no longer up for debate whether artificial intelligence will permeate the industrial automation space as much as it has the commercial sector. The biggest challenge, I'd imagine, is how do we build a robust enough nervous system that brings data to the AI agents at the industrial edge for processing, with unlimited horizontal scale. To understand in-depth how that could work, I invited Angelo Corsaro for a chat. Angelo is CEO and CTO at ZettaScale Technology, a company working...