Three Ways AI Is Helping Manufacturers Posted on : Jan 26 - 2022

Thanks to the global supply chain and growth of middle-class culture, manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to make high quality goods that customer desire at a price they can afford. One technology that’s increasingly being used to help manufacturers meet these requirements, grow their market share, and boost profitability is artificial intelligence.

As MathWorks’ Industry Manager for Industrial Automation & Machinery, Philipp Wallner has a front-row view into how some of the most advanced manufacturers are adopting technology, including modeling, simulation, digital twins, and AI. The company’s two main offerings, the MATLAB statistical programming environment and SimuLink, which is used for modeling and simulation , are instrumental in meeting these goals.

Based on Wallner’s experience, there are three main ways that manufacturers are putting AI to use in their shops.

1. Predictive Maintenance

Manufacturers typically run continuous operations, so any downtime for maintaining or repairing machinery directly impacts the bottom line. Determining the optimal schedule for performing preventative maintenance is often the first use of AI on the factory floor, Wallner says.

“One of the main challenges in manufacturing is these processes typically are supposed to run 24/7,” Wallner says. “You’re not supposed to shut something down.”

Once historical data from equipment is collected and prepared, it can be loaded into MATLAB to train machine learning algorithms, which are designed to isolate root cause of failures predict time-to-failure and remaining useful life (RUL) of the equipment. If the algorithm senses a potential problem in the data, it can signal to the equipment operator that some maintenance is needed. View More