From Nanalyze:
We recently looked at an Australian 3D printing company that was investing in Industry 4.0 which Wikipedia defines as “the subset of the fourth industrial revolution that concerns industry.” In the eyes of most companies, Industry 4.0 consists of vomiting every management consulting buzzword that can be found onto one slide of a pitch deck and referring to it as “the future of our industry.”
In reality, Industry 4.0 can best be described by explaining the concept of a digital twin. Simply put, a digital twin is a digital depiction of anything from a machine to an entire factory that’s connected using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors so that every activity, process, or movement can be measured and tracked in real-time. Consequently, you’ll have lots of big data that can then be fed to machine learning algorithms so that they can optimize your operations and either increase revenues, decrease costs, or improve safety.
In order to better understand some of the tools being used to move the world towards Industry 4.0, we traveled to the great Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to visit with a company that’s been deploying IoT solutions around the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the past four years. Interest in Middle East technology start-ups has been rising, and venture capital investments in Saudi Arabia are expected to grow tenfold by 2025. It’s a perfect place for Averos to build and deploy technology solutions used to track people and assets.
About Averos
Founded in 2016, Makkah, Saudi Arabia startup Averos has taken in an undisclosed amount of seed funding last year from Saudi Aramco’s venture capital arm, Wa’ed Ventures, to “provide companies and their customers with full and real-time situation awareness of their environment, their customers, their staff and their valuable assets.” Their platform is what the techies refer to as “full stack,” which essentially means it’s vertically integrated from the sensors that are affixed to assets all the way to the apps that are used to track the assets.
The above diagram spells out how this platform would be deployed in a factory warehouse. Firstly, you would attach these beacons to all mobile machines and people within your warehouse. Then, you would install the scanners that are used to read the beacons. The scanners can then communicate with Central HQ where all the real-time information gets aggregated in the cloud and fed to applications. The end result is a digital depiction of how your assets are moving about. Intuitively, such a solution would come in handy for use cases where you need to track lots of people and machines that move about frequently – like at one of the biggest human migration events in the world that takes place in Mecca.
Logistics at The Hajj
It’s impossible to convey the scale of The Hajj, an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city for Muslims. Nearly every one of the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims will undertake this pilgrimage at least once in their lifetimes. In 2018, nearly 2.5 million pilgrims descended upon the city of Mecca to perform a series of sacred rituals that take place over one week’s time. In order to house all the pilgrims, a tent city is erected of a scale that can only be described by pictures such as the one below:
If you thought solving the traveling salesman problem was hard, just imagine being responsible for moving millions of people around in a coordinated manner using buses. Nowhere on this planet will you see such a large-scale logistical exercise involving the movement of humans using buses. As you can imagine, moving these pilgrims, many of whom speak different languages and adhere to different cultural norms, through the various stages of The Hajj requires a lot of coordination. That’s where Averos came into the picture back in 2016 when they used The Hajj as a proving ground for their technology solutions. Today, they’re doing fleet management and scheduling for more than 17,000 buses using automatic vehicle localization (AVL) systems. Slick dashboards like the one seen below provide those responsible for the pilgrimage experience with an easy way to see the flow of people........MUCH MORE
