DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
HOW IoT AND AI ARE REVOLUTIONISING PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
WRITTEN BY : WILLIAM SMITH
The neglected art of maintenance has been supercharged by new techniques and technologies including AI and IoT , leading to new prediction capabilities
The internet of things ( IoT ) has myriad uses across society , whether its smart appliances in our homes or manufacturing robots on production lines .
It ' s in the latter area that IoT ’ s revolutionary capacity is becoming most apparent , with industrial IoT connections currently totalling 17.7 billion . Over the next five years , the overall growth rate is anticipated to be over 200 %, taking the total number of connections to almost 37 billion . It ’ s smart manufacturing that leads the way , making up 22 billion of the connections forecast by 2025 .
The perfect IoT use case Driving this growth is the simultaneous emergence of key connectivity technologies such as 5G and Low Power Wide Area ( LPWA ) networking , the lower latencies and higher speeds of which are making complex IoT communications more readily accessible for industry .
The lower latencies and higher speeds enabled by such technologies find a perfect home in the factory environment , where weaknesses such as range are less important .
The exact uses of IoT in such settings are many . Whether it ’ s managing and monitoring equipment remotely , improving efficiency or pinpointing the exact location of items in the supply chain . One of the key areas in which IoT sensors are having the biggest impact , however , is predictive maintenance .
50 May 2021