Using Edge Infrastructure to Power Strategic Outcomes in Manufacturing

For industries in which employees are mostly information workers, the pandemic jump-started massive moves to support remote and hybrid work, but manufacturing operations didn’t have that option. Machine operators and other factory employees can’t work from home. That’s been true for hundreds of years. But today, edge computing infrastructure is changing the story.

Edge infrastructure makes real-time or near-real-time human-digital interactions possible, enabling the user to experience a digital world that is fundamentally identical to the physical world for specific use cases and applications.

In manufacturing, the technology that pairs with edge infrastructure to enable companies to better address safety, resiliency, security and new workstyles is known as a digital twin, a virtual environment that is fully equivalent to a real physical environment. To be useful, the digital environment must be able to operate in real time, which is most effectively accomplished by using the edge to eliminate the latency of long-distance communications and provide the local high-performance infrastructure necessary to process huge amounts of data. With twinning, a plant can keep operations going even if it is cut off from staff by a natural disaster or other event.

Digital twins make several different use cases possible. For example, control room staff can work remotely in a control room that looks and feels exactly like the one at the plant, even interacting with one another and instantly monitoring the same data that the physical control room receives. Another example of twinning is to provide more realistic and engaging safety and operational training—training that feels like the real thing but without any physical risk.

Digital twins allow employees to virtually walk around a plant, especially when doing so in the real world would be dangerous. A combination of data from the manufacturing process, video surveillance and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) makes the digital twin completely realistic. Many industrial facilities need this sort of coverage around the clock, and staffing is easier when the employees with the necessary specialized skills don’t always need to be on site to do the job.

One of the digital twin use cases that is drawing interest from compliance and regulatory organizations is the ability to eliminate what are commonly referred to as dirty, dangerous and demeaning jobs by using specialized robots, or “cobots.” By combining the next generation of robot technology, artificial intelligence (AI), sensors and edge infrastructure to support such jobs, manufacturing companies can reduce the level of physical risk employees face. As regulations become more stringent and penalties increase, this is becoming a very attractive use case.

It all starts with highly performant and available edge infrastructure. Two industry leaders, Lumen and Intel, are committed to delivering the next-generation edge infrastructure that will enable these innovative use cases for manufacturing organizations. Lumen’s edge infrastructure has the geographic coverage needed, with more than 45 highly capable edge nodes that are connected to Lumen’s high-capacity global fiber network. This reduces round-trip latency to 5 milliseconds or less, delivering what are effectively real-time capabilities. These nodes will deliver all the performance necessary to run demanding applications and workloads. They use 3^rd Intel™ Xeon™ processors and other highly performant infrastructure components from Intel to deliver the reliability, scalability and overall performance necessary for manufacturing companies.

Lumen and Intel provide the edge platform that will meet both current and future demands from the AR/VR, AI, IoT and robotics solutions that successful manufacturers will deploy. For more information, please go to Lumen.com/edge.