ITEA Blog
Beyond Industry 4.0: the impact of new, very
innovative ITEA projects on product design 4.0
Philippe Letellier · 15 January 2019
In my previous Post I shared with you some unique results from ENTOC
to
master the engineering optimisation for production lines and from VMAP
to ensure simulation engineering optimisation for materials. These two unique results are at the end
of
the industry chain on the production line itself.
Today I want to share with you some unique results arising at the very beginning of the industry
chain,
at the design level. But even I would say it is more revolutionary than that. There is no more start
or
end, I want to speak about the actual full digital loop when you acquire a bunch of data on all the
usage of a deployed product/service to continuously adapt the product/service you are selling.
The ITEA project REFLEXION builds and demonstrates such a
full
digital loop on different kinds of products. The target of the project was to react fast to any
effects
observed in the field by evaluating and learning from the extracted usage information.
Agile development and enhancements
Océ has done an agile development with customers for its new inkjet printer. To
identify
the actual specification of the new product, it exploited 4GB of data per day coming from 300
sensors
and 150 actuators. To exploit this data lake, it developed ODAS, an “Optimal Diagnosis Analysis
System”.
Beyond this automatic analysis, key was to support quick sharing between the company’s different
specialists to reach a common understanding of the situation and then a common decision on what to
enhance. To support its teams, Océ generalised the usage of the open source Jupyter Notebooks which
easily allows text and code to be mixed, allowing all the engineers (not only the SW guys) to
express
their understanding and their proposal. Thus, confronted by an alarm coming from the automatic usage
data analysis, the designers from different cultures can quickly share an understanding and together
propose a solution that can be implemented in an agile approach. During this project Océ developed
an
incredible maturity on this full digital loop and a set of products and methodologies that can be
useful
for many other European players
Testing complex systems is becoming incredibly complicated . In any event, all the cases can’t be
tested
exhaustively. Thus, testing science is a question of understanding what is important, what is
sensitive
in your product and focusing the main test efforts on these zones to ensure a more basic test
procedure
for the rest. Confronted by a complex system, this ability to identify the key areas in your system
is
more and more difficult to master. In this REFLEXION project,
Philips undertook a massive analysis of the usage data coming from its several
thousand
connected machines, clustering them to exhibit close to 200 different user actions. These patterns
have
been used to define the normal usage and to focus the test effort on the more important procedures.
The
exploitation of the full digital loop is indeed a revolution in the field of test effort
distribution.
The success of the full digital loop
Siemens, on its side, focused on condition monitoring of machinery to detect faults
earlier. Again, it deployed a full digital loop: from the on-field data acquisition, data filtering
and
calibration through data analysis and classification to visualisation and feedback on the design. In
an
operational full digital loop, some data is to be 'lost'.
By enhancing the full digital loop with
some
simulated data to compensate for the missing data, the result was very surprising. In particular,
these
missing data very often appear in the fault situation where you haven’t enough data to ensure
machine
learning. This original approach delivers very good results. Thanks to REFLEXION,
Siemens has begun selling engineering consulting projects for condition monitoring services.
For maintenance you are regularly confronted with the situation that the maintenance operator arrives
on
site and discovers the situation is not the one forecasted, so he must return with a different set
of
tools. This generates extra cost, customer dissatisfaction and demotivation. The SME
Synerscope extends the REFLEXION results to
the
oil & gas market, enlarging the impact of the project. The state-of-the-art on smart meter
maintenance is to solve the problem at 90% success rate after the first visit. Building this full
digital loop with automatic default analysis, the problem-solving success rate reached 99.5% after
the
first visit.
A "healthy" operating room
Barco is a provider for hospital operating rooms, which is one of the most expensive
rooms in a hospital, both from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective. As such, it is of prime importance for
its
customers to enhance the operational uptime of these operating rooms. Barco uses this full digital
loop
to improve the maintenance response by sharing insights in the health status of an operating room
using
the distributors and system integrators through the Nexxis Care Plan portal that has resulted from
the
REFLEXION project. It is also a unique opportunity for Barco to
gain insights in the actual usage of its products as they appear behind an integrator in the value
chain
and couple these insights back to product design.
Fast exploitation and new opportunities
Beyond these examples, this project has resulted in many fast exploitations. The Dutch SME
Axini forecasts several million euros for the next 5 years for their new test
tools.
The Belgium SME Yazzoom set up a new product service on anomaly detection.
Philips
considers now that logfile is a treasure for design and not just an engineering tool for
maintenance.
It opens new incredible opportunities to be followed soon: all these data resulting from the full
digital
loop are generating actual treasures to get closer and closer to the end users to serve him even
better.
It will require protection and will open the door to many new services to serve all the stakeholders
of
the value chain. A great future is open.
If you want to understand more how to build such full digital loop in your business and take
advantage of
the REFLEXION software stack have a look on the
simulation
tool from TNO. It is very didactic and gives you an overview of the REFLEXION tool’s
potential
impact. A unique and original dissemination approach.
The target of ITEA is to be at the forefront of the Digital Transition. Again, REFLEXION delivers results which make the difference by using
artificial intelligence at all levels. Don’t miss it!
Innovate with ITEA, innovate with the ITEA Community, innovate using the results of the ITEA
projects.
Tags:
Fast exploitation · Innovation · Software engineering
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