A long-awaited change to boost the European industry

Artificial intelligence will be a major asset for European industry in these times of crisis.
Posted by:
Dessia Technologies
on
December 6, 2020

Because of the health crisis, companies have had to learn to adapt. The industry has gone through a radical reorganization.
In this context,
artificial intelligence will make a significant contribution to employment in Europe. In fact, these last decades a large number of jobs have been relocated outside Europe, for engineering tasks are still very often time-consuming.

Things are changing for engineering - and for the better

At a time when technology is an increasingly important tool to finding solutions, engineers must have the opportunity to explore their creativity again.

With the numerous artificial intelligence branches arising, engineering might turn the tables on (with the contribution of Robot Software, which we will call “Bots”), in order to:

  1. Record and/or develop engineering design tasks by automating them.
  2. Keep strategic “studies” within the company, so as to protect the latter’s ownership over its know-how

Equip clients in the industry and make them a better alternative to low-cost competitors

To deal with the erosion of its profits, the European industry has outsourced part of its production and engineering in low-cost countries.

Such decisions may consolidate some gains at first. However, in the long term, the industry will experience a loss of know-how face to its future competitors (China, for instance). Nowadays, deterministic AI has reached such a level of maturity that it is able to “arm” the industries with what it takes to expand.

Bots become virtual companions that boost engineers’ capacities by tenfold

Thanks to this revolution, tomorrow’s engineers will be competitive again, and so will be the European industry.

A new path towards innovation

What we propose is a middle ground, picking the best from the two traditional universes of design: needs management (specifications) and CAD (3D). This new pragmatic approach, easy to handle thanks to no-code, designs faster and takes into account both financial/marketing criteria and technical constraints.

Our “boosted engineer” bots use what we call IHEA (Intelligent Heuristic Engineering Automation) to:

  • Structure knowledge and generalize good practices - no more personal habits or whims
  • Gain time by automating those bothersome “calculation repetitions” that often come with spec modifications

How to build a bot

It takes 3 main phases to build a bot:

  1. Structuring know-how: use an SDK to describe engineers’ knowledge.

Several structuring approaches of MBSE-like knowledge are available open-source. DessIA proposes IHEA, a sort of “augmented MBSE”-like open source language that takes into account specs and CAD alike.

  1. Replicating engineers’ thought process and describing it with a workflow

After engineers have analyzed their own work methods, they will structure their approach starting from basic tasks in order to describe their design process

  1. Decision-making support: data visualization approach to help engineers choose the best solution