The IP2 project "Networking and integration technologies for individualized, adaptable and resource-optimized food production" is about transferring Industrie 4.0 approaches from the field of manufacturing technology to the field of food technology. The focus is on developing suitable analysis methods to derive the maturity level for the introduction of Industrie 4.0 approaches. Project partners include the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT), the Institute for Food Technology at the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences, and well-known companies such as Dr. Oetker and Tönnies.
Santosh Kumar, a research associate at inIT, has been working on a plug & play approach to data integration in the cloud as part of the project. This is similar in application to a USB connection. "Digitalization is naturally also showing its effects in the industrial environment. Real-time access to data is becoming more and more relevant," says Kumar. In addition, the replacement costs of machines are also getting higher. Kumar's retrofit approach to data integration now recently gave rise to an independent sensor system. A cloud solution was created for analytics, predictive learning and conditional monitoring. This makes it possible to obtain information and data from machines that until now had no communication capability at all. In addition, communication between old and new machines is also possible with the help of this approach. "What is special about this application is, above all, its simplicity. The user does not need to have any special skills or technical knowledge to operate it. Moreover, this is a simple and cost-effective solution for retrofitting older machines," Kumar describes the advantages. Machine learning is then possible with the help of the collected data. Another advantage: the researched and tested approach can be integrated not only in food technology, but in any industrial environment.