Category: Digital Factory

A mirror of processes in a real factory, in the digital domain.

Manufacturing Methodologies

Manufacturing methodologies include:
Lean manufacturing

A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate.

Digital Twin

The Digital Twin concept in Industry 4.0 come into practice when we addressed the question like: “Do we need to adjust the product?” and then we think “Let’s look at the original specs, at the drawings, at snapshots, at the BOM, at simulation results, at VR iterations, at the real performance parameters” – We simply say then: “Let’s look at the digital twin!”
Digital Twin is a mirroring (or twinning) of what exists in the real world and what exists in the virtual world. It contains all the informational sets of the physical ‘thing’ meaning its cross-discipline – not just a mechanical / geometric representation, but also including the electronics, wiring, software, firmware, etc. not just the CAD model.
Digital Twins are currently used in the context of monitoring, simulation and predictive maintenance which are all incredibly valuable and potentially transformative in their own right, however, there would seem to be much more to it. As products of all types move to include connectivity, sensors and intelligence we can’t just think about the data streaming back from the field.
Without accurate “Context” – Digital Twin – time series data generated during production and ongoing operation is difficult or even impossible to understand and analyze. In addition, the ability to interpret and act upon these data often require traceability to prior information from related revisions – Digital Thread. To complicate matters further as artificial intelligence / cognitive computing is introduced the necessity for the Digital Twin becomes even greater.

IIoT Platforms

GE’s Predix, Siemen’s MindSphere, and the recently announced Honeywell Sentience are likely to be on any short list of industrial cloud platforms. But they aren’t the only ones in this space. Cisco’s Jasper, IBM’s Watson IoT, Meshify, Uptake, and at least 20 others are competing to manage all those billions of sensors that are expected to encompass the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Sample providers: Amazon AWS, AT&T M2X, Bosch IoT, Carriots, Cumulocity, GE Predix, IBM Watson IoT, Google Cloud IoT Core, Intel IoT, Cisco Jasper, Losant IoT, Microsoft Azure, PTC ThingWorx (connected to Windchill/PDMLink), SAP Hana Cloud, Thethings.io, C3IoT, Uptake, Amplia IoT, XMPRO, Meshify, TempoIQ, Bitstew Systems, Siemens MindSphere, AirVantage, Honeywell Sentience, Schneider Electric’s Ecostruxure, Alibaba Cloud will roll out its big-data service, called “MaxCompute”, and Parker Hannifin’s Voice of the Machine IoT platform.

GE Predix: is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) specifically designed for industrial data and analytics. It can capture and analyze the unique volume, velocity and variety of machine data within a highly secure, industrial-strength cloud environment. GE Predix is designed to handle data types that consumer cloud services are not built to handle.

Siemens MindSphere is an open platform, based on the SAP HANA (PaaS) cloud, which allows developers to build, extend, and operate cloud-based applications. OEMs and application developers can access the platform via open interfaces and use it for services and analysis such as the online monitoring of globally distributed machine tools, industrial robots, or industrial equipment such as compressors and pumps. MindSphere also allows customers to create digital models of their factories with real data from the production process.

Honeywell Sentience is the recently announced cloud infrastructure by Honeywell Process Solutions. It is a secure, scalable, standards-based “One Honeywell” IoT platform, that will be able to accelerate time-to-market of connected solutions, lower the cost-to-market, and enable new innovative SaaS business models. It will have the ability to run global security standards embedded throughout the solution and make applications that are plug & play and scalable.

C3 IoT is a PaaS that enables organizations to leverage data – telemetry from sensors and devices, data from diverse enterprise information systems, and data from external sources (such as social media, weather, traffic, and commodity prices) – and employ advanced analytics and machine learning at scale, in real time, to capture business insights for improved operations, enhanced customer engagement, and differentiated products and services. C3 IoT is led by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas Siebel. It has closed deals with the U.S. State Department and the French utility ENGIE SA, based on C3 IoT’s focus on machine-generated data.

Uptake: is a predictive analytics SaaS platform provider that offers industrial companies the ability to optimize performance, reduce asset failures, and enhance safety. Uptake integrates data science and workflow connectivity to provide high-value solutions using massive data sets. In 2015, it entered into a partnership with heavy construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar to jointly develop an end-to-end platform for predictive diagnostics in order to help Caterpillar customers monitor and optimize their fleets more effectively.

Meshify is an Industrial IoT platform for tracking, monitoring, analyzing devices. The Meshify suite of tools provides all the features needed to deploy, monitor, control, and analyze the results of an IoT solution. Despite being a young technology business, it has a growing portfolio of clients with industrial-oriented companies, including Henry Pump, Sierra Resources, Stallion Oilfield Services, Gems Sensors & Controls and MistAway Systems.

http://www.iotcentral.io/