Experiments - Lighthouses

Three Lighthouse experiments have been identified in MIDIH: an Automotive Industrial case in Italy, a Cutting Tools Industrial case in Spain and a Collaborative Manufacturing and Logistics Industrial case in Germany.

The election of these is not by coincidence: the three are located in different countries in different industrially-specialised European regions. Also, they cover some of the most important manufacturing sectors across Europe: the Automotive, the Steel sector, and also the Cutting Tools Industry. In the case of the latter, it also serves as supplier for other industries such as Aeronautics, or, precisely, Automotive, which are among the most demanding in terms of Quality specifications and investment on R&D.

These three Lighthouse experiments represent three different Business Scenarios supported by the deployment of digital components from the MIDIH Open Platform: Smart Factory, Smart Product and Smart Supply Chain. Therefore, the cases also cover the whole product lifecycle: from the manufacturing to logistics and eventual product servitisation. This is the very same core of data-driven manufacturing paradigm.

• Smart Factory adopts the combination of physical technology and cyber technology and deeply integrates previously independent discrete systems making the involved technologies more complex and precise than they are now. The use of data generated and gathered along the whole product lifecycle will enable to have, among a number of benefits, a real time automatic monitoring and identification of incoming events, with the system support in decision-making.
• Smart products are an inherent part of the industrial digital transformation. The digital revolution has radically changed traditional manufacturing processes; from new digital model-based engineering to smart factories, everything is about virtual prototypes, digital manufacturing processes, and intelligent machines. Smart products integrated into modern production flows are able to self-process, store data, communicate and interact within the industrial ecosystem.
• Smart Supply Chain today is a series of largely discrete, siloed steps taken through marketing, product development, manufacturing, and distribution, and finally into the hands of the customer. Digitisation brings down those walls, and the chain becomes a completely integrated ecosystem that is fully transparent to all the stakeholders involved: from the suppliers of raw materials, components, and parts, to the transporters of those supplies and finished goods, and finally to the customers demanding fulfillment of the quality specifications.

The Automotive Lighthouse experiment is implementing innovative solutions for cross-plant and cross-border predictive maintenance (Smart Factory scenario) and continuous monitoring of components supply (Smart Supply Chain scenario), by leveraging on the experimentation conducted in FCA plants located in Southern Italy.

The Cutting Tools Lighthouse experiment is extending traditional CPS/IOT Industry 4.0 production cases to the whole lifecycle of the cutting/drilling tools, with particular focus on ensuring the stability of the process and repeteability.of geometrical quality parameters, in order to ensure a consistent performance at customer premises.

The Steel Production Logistic Supply Chain Lighthouse Experiment is extending the CPS/IOT innovations well beyond the manufacturing plant, by involving stakeholders engaged in the inbound and outbound logistic chain (IDS-ThyssenKrupp), by demonstrating the value chain challenges derived by cross-border flows of data.