Digital Factory

Digital technologies are having a profound impact in the context of the factories of the future. There are four major pillars that will drive the transition toward the so called Digital Factory, all of them interconnected among each other: data management, connectivity and computing power, which refers to technologies like Internet of Things, fog & edge computing and 5G for information processing, communication and storage; data analytics, i.e. how machines could improve their performance by “learning” from the data gradually collected and analyzed; interaction between man and machines, which involves increasingly widespread “touch” interfaces and augmented reality; transition from digital to “real”, which includes additive manufacturing, 3D printing, robotics and machine-to-machine interactions.

FBK CREATE-NET focus within this application domain is on predictive maintenance and supply-chain optimisation in Industrial Internet.

A set of realistic Use Cases developed in collaboration with some of our partners or within our own facilities are described in the following:

• Industrial Workflow Optimisation. Provide manufacturing companies with the pulse of the factory, by offering a solution based on fog computing to streamline resource utilisation (e.g. energy, space, materials, time) in industrial processes. In the context of this activity, a pilot is currently running in the premises of an Italian manufacturing company. The fog computing layer interacts with an infrastructure composed by sensor tags and antennas and provides an accurate analysis on how assets and workers move from machine to machine and if they are in the right place at the right time, in order to assess if there are deviations from procedures or bottlenecks. The activity is performed in collaboration with a major Italian system integrator and with a company specialised on web analytics for indoor spaces.  For more information about this use case  please refer to RiSING Unit.

• FBK Clean Room 4.0. The Micro Nano characterization and fabrication Facility (MNF) of FBK is composed by Clean Rooms served by a air treatment system whose reliability is critical to guarantee continuity in the production process. A demo environment combining sensor technologies, edge/fog computing and AI techniques has been set up to demonstrate how the application of concepts and methodologies of Predictive Maintenance may enhance quality control of production processes in a real setting. For more information about this use case please refer to OpenioT Unit.