About PLANTCockpit project

Motivation

Today, numerous methods, systems, and tools exist to facilitate production management, optimize resource utilization, and process efficiency. However, current ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), and special-purpose solutions are rarely integrated with each other and typically provide no more than point-to-point interfaces between selected functionalities. These sporadic point-to-point integrations do not fulfill the requirements of today’s dynamic markets where enterprises have to quickly judge complex situations, react to unexpected events, and make far-reaching decisions. With the growing focus on sustainability, complexity grows even further as production supervisors have to manage energy and material consumption, carbon footprint, and waste output in addition to classical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like process efficiency, asset utilization, quality, scrap rate, and costs. Efforts to find the optimum for yield, quality, speed, or energy consumption often result in local optima, far from the ideal solution. Optimization must start at global bottlenecks within the plant or supply network, which can only be identified if overall process transparency is given. Only a tight integration of all systems will provide the visibility and process integration needed to truly recognize the potentials and optimize intra-logistics processes – be it with respect to yield, quality, energy consumption, or waste.

Objectives

During the research project, manufacturing communities could use the “Production Logistics and Sustainability Cockpit” (PLANTCockpit) as the central environment for monitoring and control of all intra-logistical processes. Research results of the PLANTCockpit project might provide production supervisors, foremen, and line managers with the required visibility to make well-informed decisions to optimize plant processes. This includes the holistic visibility of the plan, the current status, deviations, exceptions, and bottlenecks. PLANTCockpit will suggest a model for integrating heterogeneous shop floor management systems including ERP, MES, SCADA, condition-based maintenance, energy management, and other special-purpose systems. Virtually all manufacturing operations are multi-vendor environments which makes a harmonization of all systems a highly challenging goal. With PLANTCockpit we are proposing to address this primary research challenge as a major step to reach our vision described above. Therefore, PLANTCockpit will focus on defining standard interfaces and a reference model for integrating the most prominent manufacturing processes. Current shop floor integration standards such as ISA 95, OAGIS, OPC Unified Architecture, MTConnect will be used as starting points.
 

Partners:

TUT, Department of Production Engineering
SAP AG
Acciona S.A.
BMW AG
Comau S.P.A.
Doehler Holland B.V.
Ecole Politechnique Federation de Lausanne
Iconics Europe B.V.
Intel Corporation
Politecnico di Milano
Technische Universität Dresden
Tecnalia