The Mathematics of Industry 4.0

Industrial revolution is a term that suggests a period of major changes in the manufacturing process. Known as the fourth industrial revolution, industry 4.0 is nothing more than the period of current changes in the productive process and decision-making of many companies and industries. Before we go deeper into what defines industry 4.0, let’s briefly review the revolutions that have already happen.

Industry 1.0 — The first industrial revolution began approximately in the middle of the 18th century, with an increase in the productivity of the textile industry, with factories mechanized by steam engines.

Industry 2.0 — The second industrial revolution occurred in the middle of 1913 and after the introduction of the assembly line by Henry Ford, which resulted in a large increase in production and in its billing. This led to the application of the assembly line model by other companies, aiming to increase their efficiency and productivity and reduce their costs.

Industry 3.0 — The third industrial revolution begun in the 1970s and started the automated assembly lines, presenting technological processes that emerged from a physical integration between science and production. It was thanks to these highly automated factories, that today we have a great offer of products such as computers, smartphones and tablets at an affordable price.

And the industry 4.0?

It was in the 2011 edition of the Hannover Fair that the concept of Industry 4.0 was revealed to the general public. Industry 4.0 encompasses the technological innovations of the fields of automation, control and information technology, applied to the production processes of companies and industries. The objective is to make production processes and decision making increasingly efficient, autonomous and adaptive using artificial intelligence, cyber-physical systems, big data and Internet of Things (IoT).

The Industry 4.0 encourages a complete decentralization of production process control and a proliferation of interconnected smart devices throughout the production and logistics chain of companies and industries. The expected impact on the productivity can be compared to that provided by the internet in other areas, such as ecommerce, communications and banking.

These are some of the factors by which many believe this to be the fourth industrial revolution.

Making Industry 4.0 a reality implies in the gradual adoption of a set of emerging IT technologies and industrial automation and integration of cyber-physical systems with big data and analytical models that indicate or make the best decisions based on these data. This process will create self-adjusting production environments for the increasing demand for products.

Summary

The Role of Mathematics in Industry 4.0

Having cyber-physical components, automating production and having massive historical data on all manufacturing are quite important steps in the way of industry 4.0. However, an even greater gain may be to be able to use these data to define, for example, what and how many products to produce, what order to produce, how to deliver these products, how much of each component which I must have in stock. These and many other decisions that must be taken on a daily basis from many companies and industries can be aided by an incisive mathematical analytical analysis of the data. This is the industry math 4.0, which transforms data into decision making that returns the highest profit and efficiency. To make these ideas practical, you need mastery of strategies such as mining and data analysis, mathematical programming, research, artificial intelligence, machine learning, among others.

Conduct this type of analysis, research and development of mathematical models and computational methods to solve these challenges is the core of ODM.

A Case in Industry — from ODM

Challenge: Choose vehicles for the transportation of cargo to distribution centers.

The cargo leaves the company to be delivered to distribution centers. The daily load of products to be transported has a predetermined weight, volume and number of deliveries.

In the case of this company, all deliveries are made by outsourced carriers, who have different costs and vehicles with different capacities.

Key issues:

Which carrier must deliver the goods in order to reduce the cost?

The transportation costs are influenced by several factors, such as:

• Load weight;
• Value of invoices;
• Quantity of deliveries made by the same vehicle;
• Types of vehicles to be used for transport;
• The period that the vehicle is loaded.

Methodology

Initially, all information was collected on the transportation costs practiced by the different carriers and their vehicles.

With these structured data, ODM formulated a mathematical model to represent this challenge.

After being validated, this model was encapsulated in a software, in which the user enters the load, with the vehicles and carriers available, and then obtains the product designation for vehicles / carriers. This designation is made in such a way that the cost is as small as possible! The time taken to perform this planning by the ODM software is, at maximum, 5 minutes.

Evaluating the proposal

In the table below, we show the transport costs with the loads planned by the company’s decision makers and the costs that would be employed if the ODM software had been used in the period. Values are shown in thousands of dollars.

If the decision was made using ODM software, the company would have an transportation cost economy of:

Beyond this direct economy, the entire decision-making process, as well as the way of transporting the merchandise, has become automated, reducing the time spent by various employees to carry out this planning. Also, the history of decisions made by the software can be used to negotiate with the carriers.

To know more about ODM, visit our page www.odmcentral.com or our company page on linkedin.