Intelligent Low-Cost Monitoring for Smart Digital Manufacturing

With the accelerated penetration of cloud computing and Internet-of-Things (IoTs) in contexts such as smart factories, digital manufacturing has been introduced to improve the effectiveness of manufacturing by taking advantage of massive amount of digital information. One of the digital manufacturing pathways is collecting data from IoT services and analyzing the data in a centralized manner. However, most smaller companies do not have the infrastructure and capabilities to embrace this opportunity and hence are inhibited to benefit from digital manufacturing. This paper reports on a blueprint that alleviates this problem by creating a low cost paradigm to aggregate data for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in smart digital manufacturing. This paper focuses on intelligent low-cost solutions and IoT services, aiming to identify candidate intelligent low-cost technologies and propose an affordable system to provide insights from aggregated data of SMEs. Finally, an example of real-world implementation shows the potential of integrating low-cost, off-the-shelf technologies into smart digital manufacturing.The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Innovate UK. This work is supported by the Smart Manufacturing Data Hub project (contract no. 10017032) – www.smdh.uk