Mass production of any kind would be impossible without guidelines to ensure that processes are uniform and products are consistent.
By some accounts, the world is in the middle of a fourth industrial revolution. This era is marked by the increasing automation and interconnectivity of production technologies.
As robots and algorithms gradually come to replace human labourers, it might seem natural to question the role of standards. After all, won’t factory operators simply be able to hand over quality assurance tasks to machines? Ben Sheridan, head of digital manufacturing standards at the British Standards Institution (BSI), points out that smart technologies still need a rulebook.
“The reason standards are important is because you have interfaces between parts, machines, processes, companies and people. Standards govern how those interfaces behave,” he explained. “What happens when you digitalise things is that the number of interfaces grows enormously. Therefore, standards are increasingly important.”
The BSI was founded in 1901. An international equivalent, the ISO, was set up in 1946. Today, there are tens of thousands of standards to help businesses of all sizes in all sectors manage their processes and deliver consistent services.
The development of an ISO standard takes about three years. Standards are developed by a technical committee – an international group of experts from industry, academia and government. This approach is said to be “consensus based” in that the input of all stakeholders is taken into consideration.
Survival of the fittest
Expert committees are also assembled by the BSI for the creation of its British Standards. However, Sheridan believes that the speed of technological development may necessitate a more agile approach – one that mirrors the more rapid process of selection favoured by the tech industry.
“In the ICT world, people can write what looks like a standard on their computer and make it available,” he said. “What happens is, through the process of natural selection, the best one gets chosen. This is what happened with the creation of the HTTP protocol, which drives the world wide web. It was written by one person, but it was so good that the industry adopted it.”
With the increasing digitisation of manufacturing, the modern model of the bootstrapping Silicon Valley tech start-up is colliding with traditional assembly lines. At present, it’s not entirely clear what the future of standards development will be. For now, manufacturers still rely on continually updated versions of existing standards. Among the most important and widely used is ISA-95 – which was first released by the International Society of Automation in 1995. It aims to govern the development of an automated interface between enterprise and control systems.
Security issues
In practice, ISA-95 sets out common terminology so that manufacturing and IT staff can collaborate on integration projects. According to a 2018 McKinsey report, the standard helped to address the complexity that arose as a result of globalised production and distributed supply chains. But, the report says, it “does not address the myriad data and security issues brought on by countless connected devices”.
By all accounts, traditional manufacturing is on the verge of disruption by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the name for a network of interconnected devices that can collect, share and analyse data. The IIoT can enable improved operational safety, predict when key equipment needs maintenance and help organisations realise new operational efficiencies. Ultimately, it promises to connect people, data and processes from factory floors to corporate offices. It also presents a new set of challenges for standards bodies.
“There is the definite potential for digitalisation inside and outside of the factory that actually breaks ISA-95,” Sheridan said. “We can now connect things that could never be connected before. There are opportunities within that, but risks as well, because you wouldn’t want all of your data to be open to everybody in your supply chain.”
Standards will, as always, have to evolve as manufacturing does. Regulation will always be a few steps behind invention and innovation. But the advent of digitisation means that this gap may have to close.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.