OEM&Lieferant Ausgabe 2/2021

the underlying architecture of software is a decisive factor for the performance and service life of an IT solution. Software com- ponents such as portals for the remote ac- cess to machinery and equipment or for ca- pacity market places are complex solutions today which, therefore, have to be designed in a professional way, with the coding of the mere software program playing a minor role only. In order to generate more and new service business, suppliers of machinery and equip- ment have to make professional use of in- formation and communication technology. The following list gives some examples for required IT based competencies: Shopfloor-related IT systems providing order sequences to manufacturing equip- ment and receiving data input from ma- chines evolve into data hubs for the facto- ries of the future. Machinery and equipment have to be linked to those systems, as quickly and efficiently as possible. In this context, the basic idea is that, just like in the office environment, self-describing devices are used in factories by means of standard interfaces (“USB mechanisms”), for exam- ple to add new components, machinery or equipment to a production system or to account for software-relevant changes in manufacturing. Today’s ICT architectures used in manufacturing enterprises, howev- er, have not been designed to fulfill these requirements. Fraunhofer supports suppli- ers of machinery and equipment in devel- oping methods and tools based on existing standards such as OPC UA, Automation ML™ or ECLASS and designing information and software architectures that allow for consistent and secure data processing as well as for interoperable digital twin mod- els. OPC UA and its companion specifica- tions for the different branches of mechan- ical engineering is a large step forward to semantic interoperability on the shop floor. This ensures that machinery and equip- ment can go live faster as they are “plugged together” from self-describing mechatronic components. Fraunhofer has gained exten- sive expertise through the standardization of interfaces, description of asset adminis- tration shells, visualization tools and intelli- gent data storage for PLC components, up to virtualization of PLC functionality using edge cloud infrastructure. We provide spe- cific support to manufacturers of machin- ery and equipment to link their machines to higher-level monitoring and control and MES- or MOM 1) -systems, to design con- trol systems for production lines or to in- tegrate their own machine-related control systems with the MES/MOM environment of their customers. By the way, Fraunhofer has shown that the major part of the ma- chine-related and higher-level visualization can be generated automatically, reducing setup times and errors. Gesture recognition and control allow for new intuitive approaches to interaction with machinery and production lines. Thus, the use of a mouse or a keyboard will be soon superseded in full or in part, so even users without IT skills will be able to operate the machines intuitively. In factories, the new in- teraction technologies open up great poten- tials as well. Take the feedback procedure, for example, which has to be completed for manufacturing results on the shop floor. Rather than going to a remote operational data logger or QA terminal and entering the feedback there, the feedback can be trans- mitted right from the workstation, at the very work piece, using a camera that recognizes the gesture. This saves time and reduces errors. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are broadly used today to fig- ure out unexpected situations before they occur and cause downtime of equipment. In the future there will be more to AI and ML in manufacturing: New manufacturing pro- cesses typically involve a time-consuming