Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution

My colleague Patrick Boulton sent me a paragraph that he thought was worthy of consideration in a memorandum and I agreed. The text gave a brief overview of how we have progressed to the term ‘Industry 4.0’. It explained how the First Industrial Revolution came from the introduction of water and steam power. This progressed to the Second Industrial Revolution, with electricity and assembly lines, and then to the Third Industrial Revolution, which brought us computers and robots. More recently, we have moved into the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This introduces smart sensing, giving low-cost and ubiquitous connections to a network, often wirelessly, where virtual copies (digital twins) make decisions based on big data and history (termed ‘machine learning’), cooperating with humans and other systems in real time. Products have a pedigree, called a ‘digital thread’, which is stored and can be retrieved as and when needed. When all aspects work together, we have Industry 4.0, offering the potential to improve product uniformity, reduce end-of-line inspection and reduce costs. The condition monitoring sector has typical applications that lend it to Industry 4.0/the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Factories and power generators, including transport, contain numerous sensors that provide real-time data on the status of machinery to optimise operations. Many use a cloud-based predictive maintenance solution to achieve true Industry 4.0 best practices. With this information, maintenance teams can significantly reduce unplanned downtime and increase maintenance efficiency, leading to savings in both money and time. Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

I wonder what the Fifth Industrial Revolution will be based on and how it will affect us. Will machines drive this revolution and will us humans be a part of it and have control?

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