Microsoft
Software : Cloud Computing : General
Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is designed to deliver capabilities that support the core processes and requirements of the industry. These end-to-end manufacturing cloud solutions include released and new capabilities that help securely connect people, assets, workflow, and business processes, empowering organizations to be more resilient.
Assembly Line
CommScope Collaborates with Microsoft to Advance Industrial Manufacturing with Private Wireless Network Solution
CommScope (NASDAQ: COMM) announced today that it has collaborated with Microsoft to create a converged private wireless network solution, enabling new low-latency and mobile applications to transform industrial manufacturing.
CommScope successfully deployed the combined solution—using Microsoft Azure private MEC and CommScope CBRS access points—in its own manufacturing innovation center in Shakopee, Minnesota. Through this cloud-connected, low-latency private wireless network, CommScope is already improving both the operational efficiency and manufacturing agility of its facilities.
Cosmo Tech collaborates with Microsoft to drive strategic sustainability outcomes with Simulation Digital Twins
Cosmo Tech is collaborating with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Azure Digital Twins capabilities with the addition of its strategic 360° Simulation Digital Twin technology. The combined technologies enable Microsoft’s enterprise customers to monitor systems in near real-time and to simulate the evolution of complex organization in uncertain environments over time. This will allow strategic optimizations at all levels of enterprise planning, decision making and financial functions; enabling outcomes that are robust, resilient, and sustainable.
HoloLens 2 helps Novo Nordisk employees see work in new ways
The pharmaceutical giant, a leader in the global production of diabetes medicine, has been pioneering the use of emerging digital technologies for everything from simplifying floor operations in their manufacturing facilities across the globe to conducting virtual site visits from thousands of miles away. Some of those solutions include Microsoft HoloLens 2, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides and Microsoft Power Platform. This includes introducing what is known as augmented instructions, via HoloLens 2, to shop floor employees, providing them with new possibilities to support both process performance and getting onboarded for new procedures.
Nokia strengthens partnership with Microsoft to enhance performance at the mission critical industrial edge
Nokia today announced plans to integrate Microsoft Azure Arc capabilities into the Nokia MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) platform, unlocking the potential of mission critical applications for Industry 4.0 use cases. Through the integration, Nokia MXIE and private wireless solution customers have seamless access to the full Azure ecosystem offering on MXIE.
Aimed to support industries including automotive, manufacturing, energy, logistics and government, the powerful combination will enable use cases by allowing customers to run applications in the traditional cloud, as well as directly on their premises. Collaboration in these areas will provide numerous benefits such as increasing worker safety through AI and automation, while decreasing the amount of needed backhaul with local data processing.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries (Satya Nadella 2022 Build Keynote)
Building digital twins, mixed reality and metaverse apps for businesses
Seeq Announces Expanded Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Support
Seeq Corporation, a leader in manufacturing and Industrial Internet of Things advanced analytics software, announced today additional integration support for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. This new Seeq Azure Add-on, announced at Microsoft Ignite 2021, an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft, enables process manufacturing organizations to deploy machine learning models from Azure Machine Learning as Add-ons in Seeq Workbench. The result is machine learning algorithms and innovations developed by IT departments can be operationalized so frontline OT employees can enhance their decision making and improve production, sustainability indicators, and business outcomes.
Announcing the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing preview
The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing brings the best outcome-driven solutions and capabilities from Microsoft and our partners to accelerate time-to-value for our customers in an end-to-end, holistic, and scalable way. By connecting intelligent, integrated cloud, and edge capabilities of the Microsoft stack to the highest value manufacturing scenarios, we are creating a flywheel of innovation that helps businesses increase asset and frontline worker productivity in safe and secure factories, enable remote selling and always-on service, and unlock cloud-based innovation—all with the utmost trust, compliance, privacy, and transparency.
I am particularly excited about how we are integrating Microsoft Teams frontline workers and mixed reality across these capabilities. This will increase productivity in hybrid work scenarios, and allow insights from securely connected IoT assets and products to be integrated into workflows and business processes in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Applications and partner solutions.
AWS, Google, Microsoft apply expertise in data, software to manufacturing
As manufacturing becomes digitized, Google’s methodologies that were developed for the consumer market are becoming relevant for industry, said Wee, who previously worked in the semiconductor industry as an industrial engineer. “We believe we’re at a point in time where these technologies—primarily the analytics and AI area—that have been very difficult to use for the typical industrial engineer are becoming so easy to use on the shop floor,” he said. “That’s where we believe our competitive differentiation lies.”
Meanwhile, Ford is also selectively favoring human brain power over software to analyze data and turning more and more to in-house coders than applications vendors. “The solution will be dependent upon the application,” Mikula said. “Sometimes it will be software, and sometimes it’ll be a data analyst who crunches the data sources. We would like to move to solutions that are more autonomous and driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence. The goal is to be less reliant on purchased SaaS.”
PLCs improve predictive maintenance
There is no doubt PLC technology is already strongly established on the plant floor. However, by embedding IT protocols, Cloud connectivity, and security features into today’s PLCs, it is possible to gather data that may have existed idly and use it to provide a much stronger idea as to what condition devices and machines are in to prevent unplanned downtime.
Integrating Falkonry with Azure IoT
Falkonry Clue applies advanced analytics to multivariate time-series data to discover meaningful patterns. This valuable operational data is supplied to Clue’s powerful AI engine by leveraging Microsoft Azure’s IoT infrastructure. Clue is designed to fit seamlessly into Azure’s reference architecture thereby easing the integration process.
Connecting the plant to the cloud, the Azure IoT Hub acts as a bi-directional communications brain for all connected IoT devices – managing data transfers, updates, setting up credentials for every device, and defining access control policies. These connected devices include OPC UA enabled sources such as most SCADA systems that support the MQTT protocol for data transfer.
How Honeywell's CEO is turning the legacy manufacturer into a SaaS player
Cumulatively, it marked a significant step forward in Adamczyk’s vision to turn Honeywell from a legacy industrial manufacturer into a top software provider for sectors like real estate, life sciences and aviation.
“The one common fiber across all our businesses is we are a controls company,” he told Protocol at an event on Tuesday. “When you’re a controls company, you’re connected to everything, you’re connected to all the systems in that building, in that aircraft. We use that data to drive controls, but we could use that data to drive energy savings, to drive efficiency.”
Introducing Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing
What makes the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing unique is our commitment to industry-specific standards and communities, such as the Open Manufacturing Platform, the OPC Foundation, and the Digital Twins Consortium, as well as the co-innovation with our rich ecosystem of partners.
Evolution of control systems with artificial intelligence
Control systems have continuously evolved over decades, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are helping advance the next generation of some control systems.
The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller can be interpreted as a layering of capabilities: the proportional term points toward the signal, the integral term homes in on the setpoint and the derivative term can minimize overshoot.
Although the controls ecosystem may present a complex web of interrelated technologies, it can also be simplified by viewing it as ever-evolving branches of a family tree. Each control system technology offers its own characteristics not available in prior technologies. For example, feed forward improves PID control by predicting controller output, and then uses the predictions to separate disturbance errors from noise occurrences. Model predictive control (MPC) adds further capabilities to this by layering predictions of future control action results and controlling multiple correlated inputs and outputs. The latest evolution of control strategies is the adoption of AI technologies to develop industrial controls.
Augmented Reality Gets Pandemic Boost
Augmented reality, which superimposes digital content onto a user’s view of the real world, became more valuable for some companies such as Mercedes-Benz USA and L’Oréal SA last year amid social distancing requirements and lockdowns. The companies are using the technology to provide assistance for employees and consumers in real-time, without needing to be physically present.
Intel Problems
The misplaced optimism is twofold: first there is the fact that eight years later Intel has again appointed a new CEO (Pat Gelsinger), not to replace the one I was writing about (Brian Krzanich), but rather his successor (Bob Swan). Clearly the opportunity was not seized. What is more concerning is that the question is no longer about seizing an opportunity but about survival, and it is the United States that has the most to lose.