With the white paper “Manufacturing-X”, the Industry 4.0 platform presents a groundbreaking document. Since 2019, SmartFactoryKL has been working with the vision of Production Level 4 (PL4) on an ecosystem that has already partially implemented the core content: resilience, sustainability, flexibility, digital twins, interoperability, skill-based manufacturing architecture and distributed production.
Manufacturing-X comes at the right time
Manufacturing-X (M-X) is taking the initiative on what future production in Germany should look like. SmartFactoryKL (SF-KL) sees the administration shell, which was recently developed into the Digital Product Pass, as a concrete result of Industry 4.0. With the complete digital mapping of products, what M-X means can be realized: building a resilient production that can withstand external influences, avoids CO2, is intended as a circular economy, and works sustainably and energy-efficiently.
Artificial intelligence can control, fine-tune and coordinate secure trading across digital platforms with the aim of strengthening competition. SF-KL is also working on a key technology without which modular production could fail: functional safety. “If we don’t plan safety concepts from the start, their absence will be a showstopper,” emphasizes Prof. Martin Ruskowski, CEO of SmartFactoryKL. “That is why Operational Safety Intelligence is one of the focal points of our work. In it, we combine AI methods with classic security requirements.” The intelligent security concepts work with knowledge graphs and digital twins. “The aim is to protect people and machines from harm. However, this does not always mean that the entire production process has to be stopped. Flexible reaction patterns that adapt to situations adequately make more sense.”
It’s about the production of the future
Shared Production in Kaiserslautern has been producing a model truck as a sample product as a skill-based manufacturing network since 2021. “We already have key technologies that will come into play in the next 10 to 15 years: multi-agent systems, operational safety intelligence, digital twins, 5G and much more,” says Ruskowski. “But if this is to work tomorrow, we have to develop and test it today. That is why we welcome the Manufacturing-X initiative.” Since 2021, the smartMA-X research project has been developing the secure networking of machines and companies via Gaia-X and is practically testing the implementation in the Production Level 4 demonstrator ecosystem. In the funding project TWIN4TRUCKS A consortium under the technical direction of SF-KL and DFKI is working on the development of a digital foundation layer. “It’s about data transmission between different systems at the truck manufacturer Daimler Truck,” says Ruskowski. “Here we no longer work with small model trucks, but with giants weighing several tons.”
Manufacturing-X at SmartFactory KL LIVE on 2/16/23
The title of the live talk is: “Manufacturing-X: With the data ecosystem to Industry 4.0“. On February 16, 2023, three experts will discuss the strategic importance of Manufacturing-X from 1 p.m.: Hartmut Rauen, Deputy Managing Director of the VDMA, Michael Finkler, Managing Director of proALPHA and Prof. Martin Ruskowski, Chairman of the SF-KL .