Dark Factories – Next Phase Of Smart Factories

The evolution of the industry has seen standardisation, mechanisation, automation and intelligent & self-governing machines as part of the Industry 1.0 to 4.0 or 5.0 stages. As an extreme side of automation, the concept of self-running, completely automatic factories without any intervention of mankind are getting known as 'Dark Factories'. A read on...

- Shirish Kulkarni

As the industry evolution continues with the perspective of smart manufacturing, IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), Industry 4.0 -> 5.0, AI/ML for data-based decision making- the concept of factories, which can work continuously and independently - without any human intervention – round-the-clock is getting evolved as ‘Dark Factories’.

With such factories, there are indeed gains like increased productivity, even up to 250%, errors decreased by 80%, reduced production costs, lesser outages and revenue losses, and reduction of scrap are ensured, while the higher initial costs, involved and sophisticated product systems, complexity in safety and failure prevention are definite aspects that raise the challenges in the design, development, deployment and running of these Dark Factories.

Adopting Dark Factories

It is evident that Dark Factories is a concept to be around and will stay to become a part of reality and would be constrained by the balancing concepts in Industry 5.0 like human centricity, resilience and sustainability. It is proposed to have a maturity framework for evaluating any existing factory for its readiness to become a Dark Factory – which will get established and would be leveraged as entry-baselining criteria of evaluation. Some of the global companies have already shown some proof points and we would see more and more portions of industries adopt it.

As a technical definition Dark Factories are futuristic factories where machines will be fully automated and can function without human power or with less human power when compared to the current smart factories. Dark Factories are claimed to increase productivity with zero-error in manufacturing processes and are estimated to eliminate almost 90% of the human workforce without compromising the production routine.