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November 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
unprepared for digital transformation in general, a recent study by J'son & Partners Consulting revealed.
However, local developers have good chances of becoming part of the global ecosystem for IoT solutions, which is forming at the moment, ac- cording to the study.
Just under a dozen major Russian companies have already introduced solutions that technically
Russian leapfrogs straight to smart factories
the development of "smart factories" or, as they are sometimes referred to, "future factories."
The roadmap defines "smart factories" as sys- tems of complex tech solutions intended for fast development of cutting-edge products with a heavy use of virtual testing and other contempo- rary methods.
The main points of the programme include scrap- ping storage of digital models of products on pa- per, legalising virtual tests of products and crea- tion of standards for cyber-physical systems, such as autonomous automobile systems, automatic pilot avionics and other similar robotics systems.
The idea of "smart factories" was first discussed
in Russia earlier this year when a roadmap for a re- lated programme, the National tech initiative (Tech- Net), was adopted. That programme stipulates fund- ing of RUB15.6bn ($238mn) during the programme's first stage, which is to last from 2017 to 2019.
One half of that amount is to come from the federal budget and to be provided to companies in the form of interest-free, long-term loans that they will be expected to pay back once they've developed and manufactured high-tech products.
fall into the IoT category, but they still differ from basic global IoT platforms in functionality and ideology, said J'son & Partners Consulting.
While Russian solutions are mostly aimed at optimization of the use of equipment, confined
to an individual enterprise or part of it, the most successful global IoT platforms are normally designed as enablers of digital economy business models and new production ideas and technolo- gies, such as cloud processing or 3D printing.
The other half of the funding will be provided by the private sector as investment.
"Future factories" that are expected to be cre- ated under the programme will manufacture products of much superior quality than what can be achieved with existing technologies,” Alexei Borovkov, one of TechNet's heads, told TASS.
"In contemporary high-tech manufacture, the focus is shifting to the design stage, and it is done based on math modelling, completely in a digital form, including virtual tests," he said.
"This allows manufacturers to correct possible mistakes in a cheaper and faster way and to man- ufacture products wanted by the market, entering a window of opportunity faster than competitors and incurring lower costs," he added.
To some extent, the new roadmap provides a legal and organizational basis for carrying out the Tech- Net programme.
As it turns out, development of new digital tech- nologies in Russia is hampered by numerous regulations requiring that paper records be creat- ed and stored for digital products and processes.
One of the recent roadmap's task is to remove regulatory and legal barriers that create obstacles in tech development. The roadmap creates
a framework for switching to paperless operation