Industry 4.0 middleware finds practical use in companies
"We also need uniform corporate standards in the digital sector, as they have long been part of everyday life in the physical machine world. The standardization of production and process data, which is currently still treated differently from company to company, is a prerequisite for cooperative production at the highest level and contributes to the technological sovereignty of Germany and Europe. With the new research project, we will therefore now test software that will make flexible and cross-company production processes simple and efficient," says Federal Research Minister Anja Karliczek.
Use cases from pharmaceuticals to automotive: Industry 4.0 has benefits for every sector
For this reason, companies from a wide range of industries are involved in BaSys überProd. The research project will support the implementation of flexible cross-company supply chains, the efficient production of small batch sizes, analytics and AI in manufacturing as well as revolutionary data-driven business models in numerous industrial application contexts. The research consortium spans a number of sectors, four scientific institutions and 18 commercial enterprises that are committed to the joint use of Industry 4.0.
Insights and new findings from the pharmaceutical industry are provided by Sartorius Lab Instruments GmbH & Co. KG. This is because the production of small quantities in particular poses major challenges when customer-specific analyses are required. A standardized interface that can integrate product data, process data and the ERP system is already available for this purpose in the form of the administration shell in Eclipse BaSyx. As part of the research project, Sartorius Lab Instruments GmbH & Co. KG is now developing a customizable analysis tool with which existing analysis methods can be combined and new data analyses can be implemented quickly.
There is also enormous potential for the automotive industry. Automotive supplier ZF Friedrichshafen AG is supporting the BaSys überProd research project by equipping one of its pre-assembly lines with the Eclipse BaSyx middleware. As a partner, ZF is thus providing valuable information regarding industry requirements and the actual practical suitability of Industry 4.0 applications.
In addition to these profitable insights and the transfer to cross-company production support, objective partner also hopes to be able to take into account the increasing requirements with regard to sustainability in future Industry 4.0 projects. "By using a Sustainable Twin as a digital counterpart to the real product, sustainability aspects of products could also be determined and evaluated over their entire lifecycle in the future and thus also provide their benefits in a cross-company context, e.g. within the framework of the Supply Chain Act," says Andreas Bader, CEO of objective partner AG.
