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Ideation Workshop at FESTO

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Last week, the team from the CliCE-DiPP research project met for an ideation workshop at the Festo production site in Ostfildern near Stuttgart. As an innovation leader, Festo offers pneumatic and electric drive technology for factory and process automation as well as state-of-the-art qualification solutions for the industrial environment. In addition to practical insights into individual FESTO products and the market environment in which these products are used, the aim of the workshop was also to generate ideas for new circular and sustainable value chains and economic models for the future. In fact, some very creative and exciting ideas emerged that will certainly be pursued in the future and perhaps even implemented in one form or another.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Daniel Ditterich and the FESTO team for organizing the workshop and hosting us so well. It is exhilarating to see the areas in which some SMEs in Germany, such as FESTO, have specialized and are successful in the market with innovative products.

The fun fact of the day was that we used the same meeting room that Dr. Angela Merkel used as German Chancellor when she visited FESTO some years ago. As you can imagine, this provided additional motivation for the work – because “there was no alternative”. 🙂

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.

End of 2023 in CliCE-DiPP Project

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The last consortium meeting of the year in CliCE-DiPP about two weeks ago was the last major milestone in the project. The event was made a highlight by the participation of the BMWK and DLR, who not only contributed helpful comments and questions to the interim results presented but also had many ideas for cooperation with other consortia, for example. As a result, the consortium meeting was more than “just” a meeting to discuss the current interim results, but also to set the course for further successful (collaborative) work.

In general, the consortium is extremely committed and, in addition to a series of smaller demonstrators and connections, has already been able to show several findings with regard to the elicitation of the product carbon footprint (PCF) as part of a so-called asset administration shell (AAS), but also concerning business process development taking into account sustainability criteria and sustainability strategies. It will be exciting to see how the project develops over time.

With the last reports at the end of the year, things will be a little quieter, but that will certainly change quickly with the new year. I would therefore like to wish the CliCE-DiPP project team and project partners a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in advance.

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.

CliCE-DiPP Consortium Meeting

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Impressive consortium meeting of the CliCE-DiPP research project at the Institut für Produktionsmanagement, Technologie und Werkzeugmaschinen – PTW at Technische Universität Darmstadt: We sat right in a room next to the Flow Factory and were able to gain an insight into the future of production technology. As part of the CliCE-DiPP research project, all production facilities there are being equipped with sensor technology to evaluate the product carbon footprint and CO2 product passport.  This involves sawing, milling and laser processing, as well as a powder coating system. It was great to see the project partners again, catch up on the latest developments and exchange ideas for the next phase of the project, and a big thank you to the PTW hosts for their hospitality and delicious food.

Production Tour at Protektor

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Yesterday we had the impressive opportunity to take a look behind the scenes of the production at Protektor, at its headquarters in Gaggenau (Germany), as part of the German research project CliCE-DiPP. As a leading manufacturer of building profiles in Europe, they are also confronted with the issues of energy efficiency and sustainable production life cycle.  Both aspects are addressed in the CliCE-DiPP project, with a focus on a practical solution that the manufacturing industry can use to, among other things, create Product Carbon Footprints within a so-called Asset Administration Shell.

Besides a clearer understanding of how the production works at Protektor, we, later on, discussed a variety of aspects of what is necessary to create a Product Carbon Footprint but also what has to be advanced and be done to really go ahead toward a sustainable product life cycle.

Many thanks again to the Protektor team, especially Dr. Christof Maisch, Dr. Jörg Böllhoff, Luisa Schäfer, and Kevin Weisgerber, who allowed us to take a look at the production and gave us so many insights into their strategies, ideas, and current progress toward more sustainability.

Students Work on E2COMATION and CliCE-DiPP Topics in TU Seminar

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Also in the current semester, I got the opportunity together with the Human-Computer Interaction & Visual Analytics team to hold the seminar “Visual Trend Analysis” at the TU Darmstadt in the Department of Computer Science. The kick-off of the seminar was yesterday and will take the entire semester with a final presentation at the end.

This time I offered topics coming from the European research project E2COMATION and the national research project CliCE-DiPP regarding energy and emission reduction, where we as Software AG are involved. The goal is to elaborate and find answers, especially to state-of-the-art questions, and what approaches and best practices could be assumed.

The goal of the E2COMATION project is the improvement of industrial energy efficiency at the European manufacturing level which requires the integration of energy data with advanced optimization techniques to guide a company’s decision-making. E2COMATION intends to address the optimization of energy usage, at multiple hierarchical layers of a manufacturing process as well as considering the whole life-cycle perspective across the value chain. CliCE-DiPP aims to develop a digital CO2 product pass based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), a standardized framework for the exchange and provision of information. It contains all relevant sustainability and energy data across companies over the entire life cycle of a product and allocates them accordingly.

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.