Call for Chapters — Artificial Intelligence in Industry 4.0

Published in

DataSeries

3 min readNov 15, 2019

A collection of innovative research case-studies that are changing the way we look at Industry 4.0 thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

Our latest book to be published by Springer (2020) is an international collection of innovative research case-studies that are changing the way we look at Industry 4.0 thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

Editors: Alexiei Dingli and Foaad Haddod and Christina Kluever

Introduction

The concept of Industry 4.0 has been baking for quite a while, but the technology is now ripe enough to turn this vision into reality. It is considered by many as the fourth industrial revolution and it involves the infusion of data and smart automation within the manufacturing process. To do so, it makes use of various technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and many others. Let us try for a second to understand why it is important.

If you are the owner of a manufacturing plant, then you’re probably familiar with having various machines working in tandem and producing thousands of devices every day. Monitoring the different processes which go on simultaneously is already a huge headache. Most probably, you are at the mercy of the various operators in order to ensure that the level of production is at least maintained. However, even though you are taking the best possible measures to mitigate any risks and ensure that everything runs smoothly, things still go wrong. When they do, havoc breaks loose until the main issues are sorted out. Things get further complicated when problems arise during a weekend or public holiday since the availability of skilled professionals is very limited and costly. When production is halted, it obviously results in financial losses which might also impact production deadlines. Large production processes would normally depend on warehouses of raw materials, parts or other items. All of these cost a lot of money and involve huge risks if they are mismanaged. The handling of these assetss alone is already a huge headache for management. And we haven’t even started considering how to improve the plant; maybe through optimisation or changing the basic configurations. When dealing with legacy systems, any change can be catastrophic and as such, management might be slow to respond towards the changing needs of the market. Sometimes, it is simply too later and the lack of decisive action leads the plant towards certain doom.

If these scenarios sound too familiar, then this book is for you. In the various chapters, we will explore different solutions brought forth by AI, thus pushing forward the next industrial revolution, that of Industry 4.0.