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Moritz Bock defended his Master Thesis on Visual Analytics on Digital Product Passports to Optimize Production Chains

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In his thesis, Moritz Bock developed a concept that comprises a human-centered Visual Analytics approach, enabling users to analyze and simulate sustainability efforts over the whole production chain through interactive and intuitive visualizations. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) was selected as the framework representing DPPs due to its viability, as determined by an analysis of its contents. The implementation encompasses a web-based Visual Analytics system, integrating a standardized interface into an AAS-based backend. The user interface provides tools to navigate available products, identify high-emitting products, track emissions, and identify specific life cycle stages or transport routes contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Users can test the impact of changes, such as replacing components, on emissions.

2nd Project Review in E2COMATION

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Last week we had our 2nd project review in the now three-year ongoing European research project E2COMATION. As usual in such projects, the last view month required a lot of attention to complete the last work actions, deliverables, and of course the administrative reporting. And now it was to show the achievements to the EU project officer and the reviewers.

After the preparation day, we had a full day to show all our achievements and answer questions. As might be noted, in such a big project with big industrial actors as use-cases there were a lot of challenges to be solved and also alternative strategies and solutions to be elaborated.

As Software AG we are responsible for the two tasks. The first was about real-time analytics together with our solution APAMA, which my colleague presented. The second part was presenting the self-analytics results for what we use TrendMiner and this was on me. The goal of this task is to give production workers, who are not data scientists, the ability to analyze IoT data from the shopfloor and identify problems, solutions, and optimizations. Together with some principle architectural information I also gave a demo to show how the solution is practically used in the use cases.

E2COMATION Year-end Race

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The final steps in the race to the end of the year in the E2COMATION project are underway and the major milestones have been reached. Time to take a deep breath and review the results of the project.

I started working on the E2COMATION project about 1.5 years ago and since then there have been many challenges to overcome, first and foremost a common understanding of how all the technologies paired with the know-how behind them must ultimately work together. It started with the first executable individual small demos, then extended demos, then the first live connections, and now there are finished prototypes in the project. It is always exciting to see how the work, especially in the final phases, increasingly comes together to form an overall picture and how the functional possibilities increase exponentially.

I am particularly pleased to see how much Software AG‘s technologies, especially APAMA and Trendminer, create great benefits here. This is always getting very clear when application partners use the technologies and approach you with specific feature questions. You can see that the technologies are in practical use and now it is time to turn the technology functions into production results. Which is also the outlook for the coming year in the project.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish the entire E2COMATION team a peaceful Christmas season and a happy New Year.

3rd Year E2COMATION Project Meeting in Milan

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Last week we had our 3rd year E2COMATION project meeting in Milano. The focus laid on finalizing the implementation in the four use cases. Meanwhile, the SAG’s self-analytics solution Trendminer is used in the three use-cases KEAS, MAHOU, and ROYO to have a sensorial overview of what’s happened at the production, but also to identify possible opportunities to optimize the production and to identify anomalies, which might be solved, corrected or at least send warnings automatically with the SAG’s real-time analytics solution APAMA.

As a significant milestone, Trendminer is already fully connected and configured to consume the KEAS plant data, where we already have started discussing and preparing analysis views for certain behaviors that require some optimization and cause analysis. It is impressive to see how a graphical tool like Trendminer with simplified user-friendly analytical functions could help to understand certain behaviors at the plant and in the IoT date and find potential optimization strategies together with the domain experts of the company.

E2COMATION Self-Analytics Platform with TrendMiner

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As a response to our E2COMATION project’s masterclass workshop at hub.berlin last week, I wanted to share some shown features of TrendMiner to analyze IoT data for Smart Manufacturing. As a tool that is also designed for non-data scientists, it gives a lot of analytics capabilities to production experts and engineers and simplifies the use of production data on a practical level.

For more information about TrendMiner analytics platform, please visit: https://www.trendminer.com.
For more information about the E2COMATION project, please visit: https://e2comation.eu.

E2COMATION in masterclass @ hub.berlin

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Yesterday we had a nice talk and discussion in our masterclass session at the hub.berlin toward “Advanced Energy Management and Optimization for Smart Industry 5.0 Manufacturing” organized by the E2COMATION project team. The Software AG part was explaining the event-sensitive communication to enable a simplified communication between the various project technologies and the plant. And furthermore, to explain the use of our real-time streaming data analytics platform APAMA and our self-analytics platform TrendMiner to observe and respectively analyze the plant data in the project.

It was quite interesting to get in touch with the audience and remarkable to gain insights into the experiences of other experts in the field of IoT in general and how they collect, process, and analyze IoT data in particular.

E2COMATION Research Team at the hub.berlin 2023 Fair

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The research team of SoftwareAG will also attend the interactive session at the hub.berlin on June 28-29. As the responsible partner in the E2COMATION research project for real-time analytics and prediction of stream data and the data stream self-analytics, we will explain how event data (such as sensor values or production plant status) could be processed and analyzed to identify incidents and optimization capabilities. In particular, the self-analytics platform, realized with #Trendminer, enables various data analyses without being a professional analyst or data science expert. Let’s have a look at our current results and let’s get into a discussion about advancements that might be necessary to support manufacturers in advancing their production!

We are also present and open for exciting talks at the project booth on both days!

E2COMATION Project Meeting in Milan

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Several days have passed since the last consortium meeting of the European research project E2COMATION at the beginning of this March in Milan and it has taken me some time to recap the progress of the project. Throughout the entire project, a huge push happened since the last and first physical consortia meeting end of November last year after the Covid-19 pandemic. This push led to amazing integration progress in any use case. While we already achieved solid visible results in the use case KEAS that we already presented in November last year, we have started replicating the infrastructure at ROYO and MAHOU and making also there significant progress as well.

This project’s progress could also be seen in the beginning shift from integration to refining and using the infrastructure and talking about how to use it for analyzing energy consumption and how to identify optimization strategies. It is always nice to see when research finally faces a problem that was intended to be solved. I am looking forward to the hub.berlin on 28-29 June 2023 where we aim to show some of the outcomes to a broader audience.

8th Collaborative European Research Conference (CERC 2023)

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Also in this year, I support the organization of the 8th Collaborative European Research Conference (CERC 2023) in Barcelona, Spain. The multidisciplinary Collaborative European Research Conference is an annual event that takes place since 2011 when it was initiated by University partners across Europe. It brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines in order to foster knowledge transfer, inter-disciplinary exchange, and collaboration.

In previous years, contributions came from computer science, biology, bioinformatics, business information systems, marketing, IT-security, civil engineering, education, psychology, multimedia, art, etc. Contributing students came from Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, USA, Japan, Norway, France, Turkey, etc.

Please note the Call for Papers (CfP).

Dean Grove defended his Bachelor-Thesis on Concepts for the Transformation of a Minimum Viable Product for the Automatic Identification of Users into a Scalable Infrastructure

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In the thesis, Dean Grove evaluated the infrastructure of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which is based on and provides suggestions as to how to make the not-visible part of the product, and the architecture easier to maintain for future use and scalable if the need occurs to be able to handle more requests. An MVP is a product that was developed in the lean startup method and is used, to develop a product quickly and get feedback from customers or investors, without creating a lot of engineering overhead. In its definition, the MVP uses the least amount of effort, to receive the maximum amount of feedback. While this in itself is amicable, developing something quickly leaves some best practices behind, which this thesis will focus on. Introducing some options that are industry standards or best practices will show how the product can become more future-proof. Be it either by requiring more CPU performance and needing to scale out, scale up the services or by showing how correctly managing user access and their roles can be beneficial in the long run. When working on sensitive data, some regulatory concerns will be evaluated throughout this thesis. In particular, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is extremely important.