Inside an immense Bosch factory on the edge of Worcester, 400 machines and 1,200 people assemble the intricate pipework and circuitry of more than a thousand boilers each day before shipping them off to households across the country.
When machines on the manufacturing line break down, production can be halted or significantly delayed while a new part is found. Now, though, engineers are being helped to predict and pre-empt those failures by a network of sensors that provide what they call a “machine heartbeat” – 5mb of real-time data per sensor per second on everything from cog wear to overheating.
This is Britain’s first 5G manufacturing facility, a government-backed testbed for a technology…
