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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.

CliCE-DiPP Consortium Meeting in Darmstadt

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Yesterday, the semi-annual consortium meeting of the CliCE-DiPP research project took place once again – this time at the premises of Software AG in Darmstadt. The current interim results, which are certainly presentable, were presented and discussed. It is exciting to see how the original vague idea of a digital CO2 product passport and the inclusion of a circular economy approach is increasingly turning into a technically practicable implementation and how suitable business models are developing. This would not only demonstrate an implementation of the increasingly stricter legal requirements with regard to CO2 disclosure but would even create economic approaches that would allow new or further business models and thus also open up potential new sources of income for companies.

Specifically, the CliCE-DiPP project aims to develop a digital CO2 product passport that contains all relevant sustainability and energy data across companies, using the metalworking industry and measuring equipment sector as an example. The progress made with the digital product passport (DPP) and DPP exchange platform is particularly exciting. Together with the application partners, we simulated how big the impact of such a passport can be. Network and AI-supported production control directly at shopfloor level, i.e. in the production environment, play a role here. By using Process Mining, it is possible to analyze the time and resource consumption of individual workpieces very precisely. Not only can specific manufacturing costs be precisely recorded and compared with each other, but additional consumption from reworking processes and their frequency can also be evaluated.

Another exciting point was the legal data governance model, which was applied specifically to the requirements of the new Eco-Design-Regulation. Here it became clear how legal framework conditions can be meaningfully integrated into practice. The progress made in PTW’s FlowFactory was similarly exciting. Here it was shown how the transition from individual workstations to networked production can be achieved. The first days of production have already confirmed the functionality of the lean value stream. The event concluded with the design of the most promising business models in the direction of circularity and sustainability based on the findings of the project.

Students Work on CliCE-DiPP Topics in TU Seminar

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Even 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 on October 21 and will take the entire semester with a final presentation at the end.

At this seminar, students will get the opportunity to work on current research topics that also face the national research project CliCE-DiPP, where we as Software AG are involved, regarding visual analysis and optimization in manufacturing. 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 CliCE-DiPP project is to develop a solution for 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.

CliCE-DiPP consortium meeting in Kalrsruhe

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Last week, the consortium meeting of the CliCE-DiPP research project took place at the wbk Institute of Production Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The CliCE-DiPP project is developing a digital CO2 product passport containing all companies’ relevant sustainability and energy data. The focus is on the metalworking industry and the measuring equipment sector. During the meeting, the progress of the individual work packages was presented and the results of the ideation workshops were presented.

It was informed about the current status of merging the PCF (Product Carbon Footprint) data model with the legal requirements catalog and the implementation of the data exchange model. The analysis of the information flow in the exchange of the digital product passport between the application partners Lorenz (water meter) and ABM (service provider in the real estate sector) was also interesting. The requirements developed for the TU Darmstadt FlowFactory demonstrator for evaluating the product passport were also presented.

Initial results were also obtained from the application of ARIS Process Mining from Software AG. The tool uses measurement data from machines to identify the processes involved in processing a component and determine the PCF.
Another focus of the meeting was the presentation of business models. Ideas and challenges at the Lorenz and Festo companies were discussed in detail.

Afterward, we had the opportunity to visit the Production Technology Laboratory (PTL) and the research factory, where we were able to experience “intelligent production” in a practical way using real processes. Many thanks to the wbk for the excellent hospitality.

TU Seminar Finished with E2COMATION and CliCE-DiPP Topics

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With the current winter term 2023/2024, I co-organized the seminar “Visual Trend Analysis” at the TU Darmstadt and offered some exciting topics about energy consumption and energy management in the industry. The topics were majorly motivated by the European research project E2COMATION, which has the optimization of energy usage as the goal, at multiple hierarchical layers of a manufacturing process as well as considering the whole life-cycle perspective across the value chain, and the German CliCE-DiPP research project, that aims at developing a digital CO2 product passport based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), a standardized framework for the exchange and provision of information. After the seminar ended, I was again impressed by the results, which document great overviews of the existing related works, but also current scientific insights over the entire energy management domain in the producing industry, such as sensorization, but also analysis, and regulation with/without artificial intelligence methods.

I expect to consider the results of the seminar in the E2COMATION project, in better aligning our achievements to the list of applied approaches and maybe to also optimize our approaches by best practices from the other research works. Furthermore, the results could help to complete scientific publications in particular the related works.

It is planned to continue the collaboration with the Human-Computer Interaction & Visual Analytics team at the seminar next year and I thank Prof. Dr. Nazemi for the opportunity of contributing our industrial-driven research topics to the seminar.

 

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.