My views on the importance of real-time applications for the advancement of tech overall, and for new telecom service opportunity generation, are well-known to those who follow my blogs. Over the last six months, 64 enterprise IT planners/architects have offered me comments on their own views and experiences in this area, and I think they offer a window into what’s really likely to happen in the space.
I promise enterprises anonymity in return for their sharing views with me, and that means not providing anything that might lead to their being identified. Since terminology on this topic is inconsistent, I’m going to frame the concepts in my own words to avoid giving away the person who commented.
Enterprises overall agree that real-time applications are key to any increase in IT spending or any changes in the telecom services they’re likely to consume. Twice as many say, for example, that this is the major driver in both areas than say that AI is even a “significant” contributor, unless AI is used as part of a real-time strategy. As I’ve noted in the past, almost all the actual real-time application progress has come in the form of orderly expansion of existing process automation applications, which today rely almost totally on local specialized edge systems using what’s typically known as “real-time operating systems” (RTOS) and running on systems optimized for placement local to the processes they’re supporting. These systems are what we can call a “bound process”, meaning that the process involved uses some form of mechanical system like an assembly line, substation, refinery, etc. This bound process can be represented by an IT-generated model that today would be characterized as a “digital twin”.
The collective comments of the 64 specialists indicate that the driver for change to these bound-process applications is the fact that, in nearly all cases, they are tightly coupled to related processes that are not hosted within the same facility. A factory needs to acquire parts/materials, and ship finished goods, both of which are external to the current applications. Where efficiency can be improved by linking all these interdependent elements of a “business”, the linkage can sometimes be handled by simply exchanging events/triggers, and often the linking processes themselves take measurable time, so these exchanges don’t require special communications resources. If there is a tighter coupling required, which is likely the case if the various interdependent elements are not co-located but are still proximate (within a larger facility, like a plant or yard, or perhaps even among metro-located elements) then real-time control of the interactions may be useful. This is the source of most realistic edge computing service opportunity.
Our specialists also note that when this sort of multi-process symbiosis is assessed, it is sometimes (or even often) the case that some of the new processes being assessed are “unbound”, meaning that they involve elements that are more autonomous in behavior, like human workers or things being run by them. A truck doesn’t run on a track, it runs on a road. Workers in a warehouse move according to a combination of policy/training, their own will and assessment of conditions, and the local conditions themselves. While it might be possible to create a digital twin representing unbound processes, it’s not a simple task of creating a model of a static set of elements with static relationships, as it would be in the case of bound processes.
The big barrier to including unbound processes in a process automation application is creating a process model for them. The best way to get that, all of the 64 agree, is by incorporating video analysis into both the creation of the model and the populating of real-world conditions into the model. That makes AI analysis of video the most important AI mission relating to new IT spending and new telecom service opportunities.
One example of this has already been announced, and I mentioned it HERE. Arda’s mission is apparently primarily model-building, but details are sparse at this point (47 of the 64 specialists had heard of it, but none had gotten any briefings from the company). This sort of capability would allow a company to place cameras to record activity in a space, or in something like a vehicle, and from that determine how the process was actually being conducted. The specialists doubt that this could be done without the benefit of human interpretation, or the ability to draw on the digital twin models of any bound processes in the facility, to relate movement and position too mission and task. Obviously, we need to see more detailed work in this area.
In any event, building a model from the real world isn’t enough according to the specialists. You need to be able to analyze video to populate the model with conditions, or there’s no way that the model can accurately reflect real-world behavior fully. A digital twin of a busy intersection might offer you a lot of insight into how the intersection might behave under various conditions, but not much on how it’s currently behaving. If the purpose of a process model is to facilitate the introduction of IT knowledge and IT-directed action into a real-world process, you need to know what the conditions are in the moment when that stuff is being introduced.
The ability to model unbound processes is critical to optimizing the impact of real-time applications on business efficiency, which means on willingness to invest in IT resources to do the optimizing, which means spending on IT, and spending on network service enhancements to expand the scope of the applications. A smart city needs to know a lot about what’s going on in the moment, or it isn’t smart enough.
This all raises some questions, of course, the biggest one perhaps being the impact of video analysis on personal privacy. A worker in a facility might have some concerns about some video-analyzing AI agent watching them like Big Brother, but this could likely be contained. However, spreading this kind of thing to public streets and to buildings, to augment public-safety workers for example, could mean that more of the general public are dragged in. Street-level camera surveillance is accepted and even sought in some countries, and resisted in others (including the US).
The bound/unbound system issue is something that enterprises are starting to address, and it’s already demonstrating that it has major implications in terms of both targeting and technology. Given that system models, digital twins, are complex in themselves, adding in the dimension of how they’re populated effectively in the real world threatens to delay their realization. Fortunately, there are initiatives that are starting to provide technical solution pathways, if not final answers, to these problems. There’s a lot of money on the table in this space, so it’s important.
