Digital Infrastructure for smart factories (DigIn)
Background
In smart manufacturing applications, the importance of communication has been increased recently. It is about providing the right data to the right destination at the right moment. Several stand-alone techniques for transferring information already exist, however, the combination of them is allowing to generate a thoroughly connected communication system.
Focus
The main idea of the project is to demonstrate how a digital infrastructure with an integrated flow of information between systems for product design, process planning, and manufacturing can support smart manufacturing in Scania's pedal car factory in Södertälje. To achieve this, PMH Application Lab together with KTH IIP, Scania, Eurostep, Solme and RISE IVF develops a system of both providing and extracting data in a real-time communication environment of working stations.
Challenge
The need for flexible production systems is changing the type of data provision. Instead of having the information stored directly on the workstations, the stations need to be able to draw the needed information from an easily accessible cloud. This leads to coordinating the different qualities of information of engineering (IT) and production (OT) and updating the digital twin with feedback data from production.
Solution
An infrastructure is implemented based on the plant service bus Kafka with engineering and production applications communicating through messages, analogous to Twitter. In the first demonstration, work instructions created in AviX (a productionengineering software) are consolidated with current versions of components and requirements on tools in ShareAspace (a standard based information backbone). Work instructions are delivered to the operator on demand through the user interface Node-Red. The resulting torque is measured and saved in the context of the required torque, for future use.