Smart Connected Shop Floor

Public description
Industrial Digital Technologies (IDT's) are disrupting industries across the globe. The breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. There is overwhelming evidence that IDTs can provide a step change in industrial productivity(2).

The Smart Connected Factory is central to this goal; it will alter the way production is performed based on smart connected machines/ devices but also smart products. However, the application of these technologies at scale presents many challenges, and there are few examples of Smart factories which provide full real-time data integration from the 'shop floor to the top floor '. These factories tend to operate with single vendor propriety technologies or have undertaken significant investment in creating bespoke integration of multi-vendor solutions. Such approaches are costly to develop and maintain and prevent continuous open innovation.

The application of these technologies at scale still presents many challenges such as

lack of standards creating technical interoperability issues,
cyber threats,
high number of legacy assets and constrained devices limiting data exploitation opportunities
This proposal delivers solutions for shop floor connectivity including legacy devices, analytics, and integration with the Manufacturing Execution layer of the ISA-95 architecture. It demonstrates how through rapidly maturing and fusing IDT through proof of value projects solutions can be scaled quickly to realise real productivity improvement.

It addresses 3 broad innovation challenges :-

1. How to address the technical barriers to IDT introduction? Addressing the challenge of merging IT and OT. In industry 4.0 these entities must act as one to exploit technologies such as AI/ ML, big data etc.

2. How to rapidly mature and deploy IDT to match the exponential pace at which it is being developed? Demonstrate a rapid open innovation methodology to co create IDT solutions tailored for complex Industrial environments based on the 3 key tenets of

Invent:- Focus on Open Innovation / design thinking and shared development of common solutions
Incubate:- Focuses on the rapid prototyping of solutions to demonstrate Proof of Value
Industrialise:- Understanding the route to scale utilizing 4 key methods of Design thinking, Design Sprints, Lean experiments and agile delivery.
3. How to leverage standards to innovate at pace by removing vendor 'lock out' due to the use of proprietary standards? The goal is to develop an Interoperability & standards road map in recognition of the role standards play in accelerating innovation and deployment.

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