Smart and Connected Factory

Does this sound familiar? Are you looking for ways of exploiting production-generated data to create added value for customers, partners, and your own organisation? TNO offers businesses the opportunity to become part of a network of companies, which will pave the way towards opening up data that can be used to improve a manufacturing company’s processes. We are working on a ‘plug & play’ data platform for analyses and factory control that will help you take the next step in digitising your own production process. That will offer a wealth of opportunities, in addition to enabling you to take a giant leap towards flexible production at market prices.

Smart Industry offers opportunities to achieve the ‘right first-time’ and flexible manufacture of products at a price that can compete with mass production. This is all thanks to the numerous new technologies and applications being developed in the various segments of the Smart Industry ‘wheel’ – Digital Factory, Connected Factories, Flexible Manufacturing, and Smart Working. 

All of these applications use data gleaned from everyday practice. Experience shows that, as yet, few manufacturing companies have all of the necessary data. For instance, companies do not necessarily have the ability to read-out or even to control their entire production line in real time.

Without a basic functionality that can retrieve data from the factory and make it applicable, companies will not reap the full benefits of Smart Industry. TNO can help you to implement this basic functionality.

Our goal is to lay a solid foundation on which manufacturing companies can build their smart industry aspirations

TNO’s goal is to lay the foundations for factory digitisation. These foundations will make it possible to derive added value from the combination of data, models, and processes. Technology suppliers (such as IT suppliers) can develop new applications that will enable manufacturing companies to optimise their production and to obtain a deeper understanding of their production process, or of the returns on planned investments.

More specifically, this means that TNO, in cooperation with manufacturing and IT suppliers, is now working on a future ‘plug & play’ data platform that SMEs can use for analyses and factory control. This would make it possible to:

• Easily obtain data from machines
• Perform analyses and make decisions
• Easily control machines

Subject to the key conditions that these options are all independent of a specific manufacturer/supplier (no ‘lock in’) and without requiring the company to have its own IT department.

The road to data

This ‘plug & play’ capability is under development. We have teamed up with various manufacturing companies and software developers to complete the associated development and testing work. Our approach consists of three elements:

• designing a blueprint – based on international Industry 4.0 standardisation from Germany and elsewhere
• implementing a working plug & play data platform derived from this blueprint and based on open-source principles, thus making it accessible to everyone
• testing and further expanding the platform together with suppliers (including IT suppliers) and manufacturing companies

Blueprint for factory digitisation

With regard to making data accessible, various partial solutions are already available. Many options have also been developed by the German Industry 4.0 and others. The blueprint ensures that we can make the most of existing solutions, while combining smart components. The key principle is that we use open source software wherever possible, thus remaining independent of individual suppliers.

The blueprint then reveals how the various components are related and what elements are still missing.