Back in April of this year, the Institute Industrial IT (inIT) was able to announce the successful completion of the project "DEVEKOS: End-to-end engineering for secure, distributed and communicating multi-component systems". For review: https://www.init-owl.de/en/aktuelles/news/detail/neue-objektbasierte-i40-maschinenarchitektur/ Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the project conclusion with all participants could only take place digitally so far.
On November 8 and 9, a large part of the project partners came together so that a physical final meeting could be made up for. The occasion was the inauguration of the new company headquarters of the DEVEKOS project partner Afag Automation AG in Zell, Switzerland. The company develops, produces and sells products for assembly automation in the areas of supplying, handling and transporting and is already a long-standing partner of inIT.
During the inauguration of the new company headquarters, all demonstrators that have been created in the four DEVEKOS project years were presented. These include, for example, the VDMA OPC UA demonstrator, which is actually based in the Lemgo SmartFactoryOWL and produces fidget spinners, or the OPC UA Pub/Sub demonstrator from the Festo company, which features skill-controlled fully integrated axes. Furthermore, the company Häcker Automation presented a simple system creation with smart P&P components and OPC UA architecture. The Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools (ISW) at the University of Stuttgart illustrated the use case of distributed interpolation for the synchronization of a decentrally controlled axis system. "The set-up and the exhibition of all the demonstrators showed us once again in a completely different way what has been created in the last few years within the framework of the project and what we have achieved together," said a happy inIT project member André Mankowski about the belated project final, who was on site together with his colleagues Prof. Dr. Henning Trsek, head of the department "Networked Automation Systems" at inIT and project member Philip Priss. The event was finished by a dinner together with all project partners.
On the next day, Afag Automation AG hosted the hybrid event "IAS - Inspire Automation Camp 2021", which was organized by the VDMA Robotics + Automation Association. The IAS is a creative exchange among experts for answers and solutions in the field of I4.0 and IIoT. In addition to various expert presentations on VDMA activities, the management shell or skill-based mechatronics and its LEGO-style MicroCell architecture system integration, future challenges and opportunities of industrial interoperability were elaborated in joint workshops. "Interoperability is one of the most important challenges in this area, as complex Industrie 4.0 application scenarios will require increasing cross-vendor solutions," Professor Trsek says. About 50 participants from industry and research came together and agreed at the end that the best progress and knowledge is achieved on the basis of prototype implementations. The VDMA OPC UA Demonstrator is a very excellent example of this.