Smart Industry 2/2018

any time and on any device,” Chang
says. KUKA Connect, and other similar
cloud-based technologies, will allow
manufacturers to implement robotcentric
IoT and Industry 4.0 solutions
to their operations, enabling them to
create their factory of the future. In addition,
“we’re also looking at how we
can integrate existing IT technologies
from backend ERP systems with relevant
technologies, such as Salesforce,
to better combine business needs and
customer demands,” says Chang.
These developments, he believes,
will fundamentally change individual
companies, as well as transform market
dynamics across a whole range of
industries in countries all around the
world – in both the developed as well
as the emerging markets. “At the end of
this transformation process, successful
industrial companies will become
true digital enterprises, with physical
products at the core, augmented by
digital interfaces and data-based, innovative
services,” he says. Insights
gained through the convergence of IT
and operational tech (OT) will fuel better
internal business decisions, higher
quality products, and faster delivery
times, he believes. KUKA is also thinking
about the role of AI.
But, while there is promise in all those
new technologies, including AI, at
least one executive warns against
taking buzzwords at face value. That
is the case with Jean-Philippe Baert,
COO of Arago, a German AI company
based in Frankfurt am Main. He notes
that his company was established in
1995 by CEO Chris Boos to focus on
artificial intelligence. Today, it applies
that technology to process automation
and, in particular, through HIRO
its general problem-solving artificial
intelligence technology.
Baert says the company has been able
to achieve over 87 percent automation
of processes with its customers,
which now number more than 30
globally. “Anything could be run by AI
to help companies be more flexible
and grow faster,” he says.
Baert explains that his company is
based on AI that goes beyond most
other AI; it can learn and solve new
issues that were unknown until now.
On its own
The KMR iiwa by
KUMA, a German
market leader,
transports material
or finished products
around the factory.
photo ©: KUKA
And while there isn’t a direct link to
IoT, Baert says IoT provides the ability
to collect and analyze more data. “The
combination of applying AI to the
data analytics and the environment
of the IoT edge may make possible
new capabilities,” he says. For example,
in the case of optimizing electricity
consumption of a building or a city,
you can have a perfect algorithm, but
it will probably never be as well optimized
as what HIRO can do by using
data to be precise, rapid, and accurate,
he explains.
Baert says that understanding, learning,
and solving is what is handled
by HIRO. This process is abetted by
a semantically organized map that
makes the logic relevant to, say, a city,
an oil company, a hospital, or a travel
agency. When it comes time to solve
a problem, the HIRO engine goes into
action. “This can be important in IoT
because IoT will monitor all the flows
and all the information; HIRO through
its reasoning approach will be able to
learn through those changes and arrive
at solutions that could not have
been done before.
“Tomorrow you will have super tankers
or ferries that can operate without
a crew; not just as a matter of navigating
with GPS but for anything that occurred
or could occur, the intelligence
will be able to solve the problem or
prevent the problem,” says Baert.
RPA takes to the air
Lufthansa’s maintenance subsidiary
Arago is helping to provide dramatic
process optimization on the flow of
activities and tasks that people have
to perform at Luft Technik, the maintenance
division for the airline. Aircraft
regularly undergo light, medium, or
high maintenance programs. All those
maintenance operations can take a
lot of time for the repetition of many,
many manual tasks and each must be
performed precisely, in accordance
with regulations. “What we’ve done
is not to change the task, because
they are mandatory and compulsory,
but instead we have optimized the
flow of the process and the environment
and the access to resources and
have provided a better sequence of
engagement depending on the environment,”
says Baert. The impact for
the airline company has been huge.
It is a theoretical number, but we can
decrease from ten to five days per year
that the plane has to be on the ground
for maintenance. “It is only through
reasoning by AI that we can do that,”
he adds. Needless to say, those business
impacts become fodder for RPA
and high-level management consideration.
Another view on the IoT–RPA link
comes from Automation Anywhere’s
Kakhandiki. “We find with RPA there
is a very current trend; there has been
an explosion of data through digitization
and analysis and for the first time,
data is accessible and visible,” he says.
“It is coming not just from digitization
of processes but from IoT and sensor
data,” he adds.
“In our view, as IoT becomes bigger
and bigger there is a natural play between
IoT and RPA,” Kakhandiki says.
When you create a bot on his company’s
platform you can log any data
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