Monitoring on a shoestring: Low cost solutions for digital manufacturing

Hawkridge, Gregory; Mukherjee, Anandarup; McFarlane, Duncan; Tlegenov, Yedige; Parlikad, Ajith Kumar; Reyner, Nicholas J.; Thorne, Alan

doi:10.1016/j.arcontrol.2021.04.007

Cited by 30 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…For manufacturing digital solutions to be genuinely low cost, the costs of development and deployment also need to be low cost in addition to the cost of the technologies used [3]. The Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring project has developed an approach to design, implement and deploy digital solutions, focusing in the following aspects [10,11]:…”

Section: Low-cost Digital Solutions For Sme Manufacturersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to the complexity of defining a clear digitalisation strategy, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are particularly challenged by the cost and a lack of available digital skills to develop and deploy digital solutions [10]. Digital solutions typically involve the development of various components such as sensing, data acquisition and storage, data analysis, machine learning, and graphic interface components for data input and data visualisation [3]. Applications such as condition and process monitoring, machine vision for quality inspection, predictive maintenance, job tracking, digital work instructions, which have been identified as some of the high priority solutions for manufacturing SMEs [15], require some or all of the aforementioned elements.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Visualisation elements are a key component in most of these digital solutions. Companies are often more interested in quick but effective visualisation of data before going for more complex data analytics techniques [3]. Visualisation has been identified as an essential, low-cost, and "simple" way to start understanding the benefits of digitalisation and allow companies to kick off their digitalisation journey [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Visualisation on a Shoestring: A Low-Cost Approach for Building Visualisation Components of Industrial Digital Solutions

Martínez-Arellano

McNally

Chaplin

et al. 2022

Service Oriented, Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing Systems for Industry of the Future

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The rate of adoption of digital solutions in manufacturing environments remains low despite the benefits these can bring. This is particularly acute among industrial small and medium enterprises (SMEs), who typically do not have the confidence to adopt new technologies and for which cost and a lack of skills remain key barriers. Most digital solutions require some type of visualisation component, being a vital way to the interpret and use effectively the data. Data visualisation on its own provides an opportunity to bridge the gap of digitalisation in SMEs by providing them invaluable process insights in an efficient manner without requiring high levels of training or expertise. However, as with other digital technologies, software components such as data analytics and visualisation are commonly developed, deployed, and maintained by a third party, and SMEs lack the expertise to understand how to implement or change visualisations and how they can be applied in the manufacturing domain. The Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring approach proposes using off-the-shelf components, both hardware and software, to develop low-cost digital solutions with minimal expert knowledge. The underlying Shoestring architecture enables the incremental connectivity of different solution components using a service-oriented approach. This paper introduces the implementation of visualisation-as-a-service, where the visual components of a digital solution is dynamically created by a set of reusable, configurable and modular elements. We also introduce the use of templates for the no-code creation of visual solutions, taking advantage of the re-usability of visual components across different digital solutions.

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Section: Low-cost Digital Solutions For Sme Manufacturersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Visualisation on a Shoestring: A Low-Cost Approach for Building Visualisation Components of Industrial Digital Solutions

Martínez-Arellano

McNally

Chaplin

et al. 2022

Service Oriented, Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing Systems for Industry of the Future

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Preliminary research on low-and no-code development platforms shows an initial trend towards smaller organizations making use of these tools to expand application development. A study of small to medium size manufacturing companies found that workflow automation and low-code applications were effective for monitoring product production, indicating that these solutions could be helpful for smaller organizations (Hawkridge et al, 2021). In 2020, Bubble, Inc. surveyed 741 developers using no-and low-code platforms and found 59% of them were self-employed or working for a start-up and another 17% were working in a small business (Gadberry & Romero, 2020).…”

Section: Organizational Sizementioning

confidence: 99%

Rise of the Citizen Developer

Lebens

Sorsen

et al. 2021

MBR

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A worldwide shortage of developers has made low- and no-code platforms important and necessary. This paper investigates the use of these platforms in organizations, along with the role of workforce automation tools. A survey was conducted to find out how prevalent low- and no-code platforms and workforce automation tools are within companies. These platforms are used by citizen developers, employees who are working outside of the Information Technology (IT) department and are not professional programmers. With low- and no-code platforms citizen developers can create the applications that are needed by their work units or even their entire organizations. These platforms are seen as key to the demands of digital transformation. The results of this study are that companies both large and small are making use of low- and no-code platforms, as well as workforce automation tools. In addition, the majority of organizations have employees outside of the IT department who are creating technology solutions. The broad implication of this research is that citizen developers using low- and no-code platforms to create technology solutions may be the solution to the current shortage of developers. By using low- and no-code platforms, the citizen developer can create the applications that the manager needs for their team. This increases the technology available to the organization while at the same time reducing the pressure on the IT department.

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“…In particular, DMS offers a framework for developing low-cost digital solutions in terms of five stages: (1) needs assessment, (2) solution specification and development, (3) procurement, installation and testing, (4) training, and (5) operation and maintenance. Given its successful outcomes reported in ; Hawkridge et al ( , 2021, DMS is chosen as the foundation for the approach proposed in this paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards low-cost machine learning solutions for manufacturing SMEs

et al. 2021

Self Cite

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Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used to enhance production systems and meet the requirements of a rapidly evolving manufacturing environment. Compared to larger companies, however, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lack in terms of resources, available data and skills, which impedes the potential adoption of analytics solutions. This paper proposes a preliminary yet general approach to identify low-cost analytics solutions for manufacturing SMEs, with particular emphasis on ML. The initial studies seem to suggest that, contrarily to what is usually thought at first glance, SMEs seldom need digital solutions that use advanced ML algorithms which require extensive data preparation, laborious parameter tuning and a comprehensive understanding of the underlying problem. If an analytics solution does require learning capabilities, a ‘simple solution’, which we will characterise in this paper, should be sufficient.

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Monitoring on a shoestring: Low cost solutions for digital manufacturing

Cited by 30 publications

References 66 publications

Visualisation on a Shoestring: A Low-Cost Approach for Building Visualisation Components of Industrial Digital Solutions

Visualisation on a Shoestring: A Low-Cost Approach for Building Visualisation Components of Industrial Digital Solutions

Rise of the Citizen Developer

Towards low-cost machine learning solutions for manufacturing SMEs

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