Better together: The power of the OI4 Imple­men­ta­tion Alliance commu­nity

An inte­gra­tion project at Dutch Duurza­amhei­ds­fab­riek (Sustain­ability Factory) has received the Alliance’s first OI4 Imple­men­ta­tion Award. It took barely three months from the idea to the first results, which is a testa­ment to the perfor­mance of those involved — including members of the Alliance and non-members. The resulting bene­fits are obvious to any company that decides to join this imple­men­ta­tion alliance.

The impetus for the Alliance to carry out an imple­men­ta­tion project for the process industry came from Jules Oudmans of UReason, an Alliance member and Director at UReason: “I have known Daan Wortel of the Duurza­amhei­ds­fab­riek for a long time. The Flow Centre of Excel­lence provides an excep­tional, industry-oriented test facility that resem­bles real life in terms of hard­ware, commu­ni­ca­tion proto­cols and control systems.”

The Duurza­amhei­ds­fab­riek (Sustain­ability Factory) is a joint facility for the city of Dordrecht near Rotterdam and the ROC Da Vinci College, a voca­tional educa­tional insti­tu­tion for industry. “The Flow Center of Excel­lence is a model factory for the process industry where we teach,” explains Daan Wortel, Managing Director of Duurza­amhei­ds­fab­riek.

“Soft­ware such as from UReason, as well as diverse hard­ware from other foun­da­tion members is already installed there. I liked the idea of taking the next step in the digi­tal­i­sa­tion of the process industry and was able to gain the support of SMITZH, the Smart Industry funding body for the Rotterdam metro­pol­itan region, for the project.”

This is the strength of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance: digi­tal­i­sa­tion projects emerge from the personal network of the members, combining what already exists into a func­tioning system. The result is project delivery faster than it could be realised at the same pace by indi­vidual members alone. Once the project is set up, other members derive the greatest possible benefit. The project took just under three months from the first hard­ware instal­la­tion in November 2021 to the tests of the field to edge, to cloud commu­ni­ca­tion of equip­ment diag­nos­tics and prog­nos­tics — at the end of January 2022. It’s evident why the demon­stra­tion project at the Flow Centre of Excel­lence received the OI4 Imple­men­ta­tion Award 2021.

A total of 11 Alliance members are directly or indi­rectly involved in the Alliance’s OI4 Demon­strator for Process Industry. The aim of the project is to connect sensors and flowme­ters, which contin­u­ously monitor the trans­port and processing of liquid goods, from the factory to the cloud in a contin­uous and manu­fac­turer-inde­pen­dent manner. This will generate more data (some of which is already processed in the Edge), which can then be used for predic­tive main­te­nance, for example. “Sustain­ability plays an impor­tant role for us, of course. A facility that is opti­mally adjusted and func­tioning consumes less mate­rial, which means it is more econom­ical. By setting up digital twins, it also func­tions more reli­ably,” adds Wortel.

For example, the classic players in flow measure­ment, such as Samson — an early member of the Alliance — and Krohne, a joint venture partner of Samson, are involved. Samson, founded in 1907 in Mannheim, Germany, is the specialist for control valves for the process industry. Krohne was founded in 1921 in Duis­burg, Germany, and specialises in process instru­men­ta­tion. For example, the FOCUS‑1 Intel­li­gent Process Node, devel­oped by the two compa­nies as part of their joint venture FOCUS-ON — a member of the Alliance — is installed in the facility on the factory floor. It combines the func­tions of sensors, actu­a­tors, and control in a single device, and can also perform edge func­tions. Hard­ware from non-members, such as Honey­well temper­a­ture trans­mit­ters, are also inte­grated. IO-Link masters from Pepperl+Fuchs and RIO HART Gate­ways unlock the data from the field, hard­ware from WAGO is included at the PLC and Edge level, and the APM-Studio moni­toring soft­ware is provided by UReason. Finally, SAMDig­ital Valve Smart, Microsoft’s Azure IoT Hub and PTC Thing­worx are used in the cloud.

In FOCUS-ON elec­tronics, for example, the models of UReason are realised in terms of controls, alarms and diag­nos­tics up to the predic­tion of events. This allows emerging prob­lems to be detected in real time, such as non-confor­mi­ties and fault events, defining crisis levels that require preven­tive inter­ven­tion.

A digital twin maps internal vari­ables and processes (including valve control, flow, pres­sure, temper­a­ture), reduces the complexity of distrib­uted control systems (DCS) and enables new func­tion­al­i­ties. For example, the digital twin can “step in” if there is a malfunc­tion or damage to a sensor.

“A large company from Germany with different produc­tion sites world­wide has expressed strong interest in this inte­gra­tion project,” says Daan Wortel. But a global telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions company is also looking into the possi­bility of expanding the case with SAP IOT and SAP PAI soft­ware.

Compa­nies from the process industry that are not yet members of the Alliance can view the Alliance’s constantly evolving OI4 Demon­strator for Process Industry in prac­tice. If they need to imple­ment it, they are welcome to become members of the Alliance to imme­di­ately benefit from its complete best prac­tice.