Jaguar Land Rover reaches for graph database in search of supply chain knowledge during chip shortage
- Reference: 1620640865
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/10/jaguar_land_rover_tigergraph/
- Source link:
A customer of rival database TigerGraph for a little over two and a half years, the £23bn turnover automotive manufacturer first applied the concept of graph analytics to its supply chain challenges, an area where use cases have been able to demonstrate their economic value, Harry Powell told The Register .
"When we started looking at graphs, using the more mainstream Neo4j, we very quickly found that with our kind of graph, which is very highly linked and very heterogeneous, most graphs wouldn't scale.
When a whole bunch of tow bars don't turn up at the factory, and most of the cars you make need tow bars, you can't just stop the factory
"You have exponential complexity: with the number of nodes you have and the number of steps you have, complexity goes up exponentially, really fast. We were very clear that we needed to find a graph database that partitioned across a distributed network."
Although it is the most popular graph database on the market, according to DB-Engines, Neo4j is not a distributed system capable of running across multiple nodes. Graph databases are designed to model and analyse networks of relationships, rather than put figures in rows and columns like a relational database.
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Powell said Neo4j was easy to get hold of and play around with. "For small models, it's great. For models that are relatively homogenous, with not too many links, it does fine. What we found was as soon as we move beyond [a] point model, we just hit a wall."
The Register contacted Neo4J for comment. It took the opportunity to point out that Neo4j had been "battle-tested for performance and scale," while preserving ACID compliance and data integrity. Deployments are live in 2,000 startups, 800 enterprises, and 75 per cent of the Fortune 500, it said.
Tara Jana, senior product marketing director, said Neo4j's core algorithm is Raft, a distributed algorithm for maintaining a consistent log across multiple shared-nothing servers. "Neo4j processes graphs extremely efficiently. We have dozens of customers running with many billions of nodes/relationships, with the ability to take on 500+ million updates per day: the ability to process demanding workloads trumps architectural preferences," he said.
The supply chain gang: When parts go missing
But what works for some organisations was not working for Jaguar Land Rover. [4]Chip shortages , COVID-19 disruption, and the greening of our economic infrastructure all have one thing in common for the Tata-owned automotive firm: they are headaches for supply chains, especially in the automotive sector.
The recent semiconductor supply problems had an impact too, [5]temporarily shutting down two of the company's UK plants in April .
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Initially, the distributed TigerGraph database was applied to understand how changes in supply or the availability of parts might affect production. "We have many parts, and many suppliers of parts, and we need to understand how they link with features of the car, like the hi-fi system or a panoramic roof, which might have parts [that] are shared," said Powell. "Then we look at orders and manufacturing. The question is, really, how do you deal with change?
"If you have a very static system that you're just trying to optimise you're just trying to squeeze that lemon: that's a relational database's kind of work. But it's not about dealing with change.
"When a whole bunch of tow bars don't turn up at the factory, and most of the cars you make need tow bars, you can't just stop the factory."
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The challenge was then looking for options among the cars that could be made with the components already on-stream, Powell said. "That's a really hard problem if you're solving it with an Excel spreadsheet and a team of people. You might need three weeks, by which time you may have lost your opportunity."
Such an approach has come into play with the global chip shortage, Powell said.
"One of the things it's been able to do is to identify common tier-one suppliers, where we don't know much about the tier-two. So we can we can actually identify where to put our effort into working out where our exposure is."
The approach will become all the more important as the industry strives to meet demands to demonstrate an ethical and environmentally sustainable supply chain while at the same time making the transition to electric vehicles. UK government wants to outlaw the sale of all petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and [8]Jaguar Land Rover will move to all-electric production by 2025 .
As well as talking about struggling with Neo4j in industrial graph applications, Powell also disparaged the idea of building graph capabilities on top of existing relational databases, as Oracle and PostgreSQL have done.
"That hasn't worked because the whole point of graph is your pre-encoding your joins," he said. "In graph, every step you do is essentially a join. The [relational databases] that I've seen have a kind of graph presentation layer on top but underneath it is still using the same old engine and that makes it slow in comparison." ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/04/tsmc_arizona_fabs/
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/22/jaguar-land-rover-to-suspend-work-at-major-uk-car-plants-amid-computer-chip-shortage
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[8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56072019#:~:text=Jaguar%20Land%20Rover's%20Jaguar%20brand,part%20of%20its%20new%20strategy
[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Got any 300TDis handy?
ECU less = field hardened.
I pity the poor sod going into the boondocks and an ECU fries...
Anything can happen in the boondocks. Mr Murphy's a regular visitor to forn parts.
Re: Got any 300TDis handy?
I really don't understand why some people think that having an ECU controlled engine makes it unreliable when compared with older engine technology.
ECU controlled fuel injection brought unprecedented levels of reliability, fuel economy, clean emissions and performance, that was simply not possible with carburetors. That's why all modern engines are built that way. It is incredibly rare for an ECU to fail and even when a sensor or actuator fails, they usually let you limp home rather than being stuck by the roadside waiting for a very nice man in a yellow tow truck.
Maybe you are not old enough to remember the sheer hell of trying to start a 1970's car on a cold and damp morning. Spraying WD40 inside the distributor cap and then cranking it until the battery goes flat while fiddling with the choke trying to find just the right mix to make it fire.
ECU controlled cars don't ever have that trouble, they start first time, every time. They give you double the mileage and double the horsepower.
I dunno, maybe Landrovers are different to other cars. They do have a reputation for being unreliable. But if you do break down while exploring the wilder parts of Africa in a Landrover, I expect you will find that the local mechanics are far more experienced at fixing fuel injected engines than carburetor engines because every car they've seen in the last 30 years has been made like that.
Re: Got any 300TDis handy?
I don't consider myself old (just under 40), but I do remember chokes, my first car had one what a pain that was.
ECU's == good :) other on-board computer systems in cars == bad, I've lost count of how many times my car has told me tyres are flat and I know damn well they're fine (you can feel a flat tyre), at which point its into the terrible UI to find the appropriate menu and force a recalibration; the thing is, you can have the sensors replaced, car software upgraded, etc... and the problem still occurs.
Re: Got any 300TDis handy?
"ECU's == good :) other on-board computer systems in cars == bad"
The problem - as we saw with analysis of the Toyota runaway acceleration issues - is that improved computer horsepower and increased memory led to rotten programming and lax practices becoming widely tolerated in safety-critical systems as accountants took over
mechanical systems wear and Landrovers were always hideously unreliable - hence why they went from 98% to 1% of the australian 4WD market in 12 months when Landcruiser became available without an electronic system in sight
Re: Got any 300TDis handy?
I really don't understand why some people think that having an ECU controlled engine makes it unreliable when compared with older engine technology.
It's more about being able to fix problems when they go wrong with a rudimentary toolkit like you would have for a Ferguson TE20. At least with a rotor arm and distributor cap and a carb jet you could see stuff that's gone wrong and poke it out with a bit of wire or fashion a workaround.
I'm not a fan of old cars, but that was the old 1940s design Land Rover thing. If you were in some desert or jungle environment, a handy fix is usually possible.
The biggest problem with old cars is even low speed accidents bust the bodies of the occupants.
Re: Got any 300TDis handy?
Reliability
Actually with the older ones they were not THAT bad.
If they break they are usually repairable, unlike some of the alternatives.
The last decent old Defenders if you were taking them to the back of beyond a S/H but correctly coded ECU was a good idea, and a crank sensor a VERY good idea.
On my contemporary Discovery I have had a few minor breakdowns, fuel pump failed, drove home 140 miles with no fuel pump, bought in part (VDO). Alternator failed (charged battery and went and got a new one), bought in, starter (whacked with breaker bar), bought in, battery consumable (RAC got me started, did not turn off until back home again with a new one).
Not bad for a near 20 year old car.
>If you have a very static system that you're just trying to optimise you're just trying to squeeze that lemon: that's a relational database's kind of work. But it's not about dealing with change
>...the whole point of graph is your pre-encoding your joins.
I don't disagree that a graph is a great tool for supply chain management, but it takes some serious cognitive dissonance/fundamental misunderstandings to maintain the simultaneous positions that relational schemas are inflexible because they can't be easily changed and graph schemas are flexible because they're pre-encoded and physically laid out for a specific purpose.
Any graph practitioner (including myself!) will tell you change is as big a killer - if not bigger - than in relational systems. In warehouse land we have efficient ETL tooling and we have very robust data modeling designs to evolve data (e.g. scd, data vault etc). If you need to change a graph you've probably got no choice but to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, because they are all just lists of pointers under the covers.
And that's the point you discover just how bad the world of bulk-transformation graph tooling really is.
... Harry Powell...
Why am I thinking of Harry Potter?
"you can't just stop the factory"
Um, in point of fact, if you are missing a critical component in your production process, I don't see that you have the choice.
Of course, you can likely make vehicles while you wait for tow bars, but when you make engines and you don't get the chips they need, you're gonna have to stop making them until you do.
This wonderful world of JIT production is going to have to get back to grips with the notion of stock (oops, a beancounter just fainted).
Re: "you can't just stop the factory"
This wonderful world of JIT production is going to have to get back to grips with the notion of stock ( oops, a beancounter just fainted ).
(My bold)
A good start, but something more permanent would be better.
Please try harder.
Is Versant DB still about? That I remember you could build exceedingly large graphs in and was extremely fast.
I see TigerGraph is written in C++ and headquartered in Redwood City....just like Versant. What are the chances?
Solution looking for a problem
Was force to use neo4j on an NHS project as the NHS architect wanted to use 'shiny, shiny'. There was no graph-like data in the project.
Got any 300TDis handy?
They are ECU less.
Anything newer will be full of ECUs ranging from 1 (TD5 Defender) to too many