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SnT and Industry 4.0: Smart Factories

  • Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT)
    02 décembre 2020
  • Catégorie
    Recherche

Industry 4.0 has become a reality, generating an amount of interactions and data which can be used in a variety of ways.

Besides the obvious optimisation benefits, how can companies best leverage these new capabilities? While every business is different, there is much that can be learnt from local front-runners.

The Paperjam event “10×6 Digital: Smart Factories”, held on 26 November, brought together players active in the Luxembourg Industry 4.0 ecosystem to share the challenges as well as the good practices developed by local companies and entities. SnT’s Director Björn Ottersten was a speaker at the event.

Ottersten held a session about the role of SnT in Industry 4.0, highlighting the importance of understanding and using data from connected systems in the right way. SnT researchers have been working in partnership with several companies on transforming their supply chains, by developing systems that intelligently collect and translate all the additional data from IIoT devices into one common language.

As an example, Ottersten mentioned SnT’s partnership with CEBI, a manufacturer of electromechanical components for the automotive industry, household appliances, e-mobility applications and industrial applications. SnT is helping CEBI transition from 3.0 to 4.0, thus improving efficiency and production. The first milestone in the project was to allow Cebi to easily access data generated by multiple vertically oriented closed systems, wherever and whenever needed.

Today, halfway through the project, CEBI is already able to collect and view standardised data from its machines in real time. This means staff can spot problems right away, before faulty pieces are produced. As a next step, SnT’s researchers will focus on adding AI to make their production system completely flexible. This will also enable CEBI to leverage data analysis for forecasting.

At the moment, SnT has several Industry 4.0 projects running with established companies. With a team specializing in IoT, and several other groups at SnT contributing their expertise in Automation, Cybersecurity, Big Data, Computer vision, and more, our research enhances existing manufacturing processes, creating operational efficiency from IoT networks and improved systems control.