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Final Project Review in E2COMATION

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Last week, we had our last and final project review of the European research project E2COMATION. As usual in such projects, the last view month required a lot of attention to complete the last works, 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 alternative strategies and solutions to be elaborated on to achieve the intended innovations. The technical challenges and the delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic finally led to a project extension for approx. 1,5 years.

As Software AG, we are responsible for the two tasks. The first part was presenting the self-analytics platform for plant workers 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 shop floor and identify problems, solutions, and optimizations. The second part was about real-time analytics together with our solution APAMA, which my colleague presented. Together with some principle architectural information, we also gave demos to show how the solutions are practically used in the use cases.

To summarize the project for me: It was indeed challenging in more ways than one. But on the other hand, the project fundamentally immersed me in the topic of Smart Manufacturing and IoT Analytics, and I hope to continue working and researching in this field in the future. It was also exciting to come into contact with so many experts in the field and to have intensive yet constructive discussions (both technical and perspective).

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.

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!