In our examination of the expansion of Control Room-related applications, we could not miss the pairing of Control Rooms with the IoT sector. In a world where potentially every piece of equipment is connected, controllable, and communicates with command and control centers, reading and interpreting data sets the stage for exciting new scenarios.
We continue our column in collaboration with Barco on Control Rooms, discovering new applications and the evolution of this sector, driven strongly by Industry 4.0 policies. If you still link the Control Room only to Mobility and Security you will instead have to deal with a sector in great development, where management, control, and data reading are aspects applicable to multiple use cases. It is a natural consequence that there is therefore a real elective affinity between Control Room and IoT: it too is evolving very rapidly, in all business sectors, bringing with it a huge amount of big data to analyze. From energy consumption to checks on stocks of materials and goods to production realities: “Industry 4.0 has provided a strong impetus in this sense,” Fabrizio Ponzo, Territory Manager Italy at Barco, tells us, “favoring integration with software and systems dedicated to machine learning, artificial intelligence, hyper-automation, and cybersecurity, allowing not only analytical measurement of plant performance but also remote monitoring of its status and the ability to approach issues related to predictive maintenance.
The data itself if not aggregated and contextualized is difficult to interpret: its aseptic representation is not sufficient to provide us with useful information, but rather at the same time is complicated to understand and evaluate by the teams in charge. Therefore, the Control Room becomes the place for “data-driven” decisions, that is, guided by correctly read and interpreted data, a central factor for all realities that wish to govern their processes and results from a Smart perspective. In this sense, it becomes crucial to leverage AI technologies to automate all phases of data analysis and aggregation, while maintaining a human-centric approach in favor of the correct ergonomics of visualization, taking advantage of the new skills available to operators of new generations of control rooms.
Event prediction is the next frontier: collected data from different source sources, properly compared, will be able to offer insight into trends and probabilities. “The interconnection of tools and machinery in the civil and industrial worlds,” Fabrizio Ponzo points out to us, “enables and manages the predictive analysis, activities that allow, if well implemented, to identify trends and possible occurrence of anomalies, avoiding downtime risks and optimizing maintenance activities on critical assets.
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