The goal of the project at GEBHARDT’s headquarters in Sinsheim is Predictive Maintenance and preventing downtime in warehouse operations.
Reinach, Switzerland, 12.07.2022
The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance has awarded the “Implementation Award 2022” to GEBHARDT Intralogistics Group and Dunkermotoren for an integration project based on the Alliance’s best practices at GEBHARDT’s headquarters in Sinsheim. This is the second Implementation Award after the recognition of the Dutch Duurzaamheidsfabriek in autumn 2021, a sustainable model factory for the process industry. Once again, the teams only needed just under three months to set up the architecture in the fully operational main warehouse of GEBHARDT. However, the awarding of the Implementation Award does not mark the end of these projects. More partners are continuously joining and establishing an intralogistics platform that implements industry-wide standard-compliant best practices for Industry 4.0. Beneficiaries of such projects are companies that now join the Alliance and can virtually “out-of-the-box” adopt a standardized and practically tested solution.
Highly available warehouses are one of the key components in Industry 4.0. In this context, the critical components in a warehouse are the units that automate warehouse operations. The project was jointly initiated by GEBHARDT and Dunkermotoren and initially aimed at checking the condition of components of Dunkermotoren in the GEBHARDT shuttles and enabling early intervention in the case of anomalies.
“Our jury was very impressed by the quick implementation in GEBHARDT Intralogistics’ live-operated warehouse,” explains Ekrem Yigitdöl, Managing Director of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. “So, this is not a showcase or a pilot application. Moreover, the implementation is comprehensive with a variety of collaborating partners and across multiple levels, which we call OI4 Process Houses. Use cases were implemented in the Process Houses of Asset Onboarding, Condition Monitoring, Process Twin, Product Twin, Enterprise Logistics, and Cross Enterprise. With this, we, as an Alliance, once again demonstrate that we can implement standards practically and market-oriented.”
Implementation of the Asset Administration Shell
“In this project, we essentially took on the role of our end customers and set up an even more general abstraction level than our own Galileo IoT® platform using the Alliance architecture,” says Yannick Maier, Product Manager for Digital Products and Services at GEBHARDT Intralogistics Group. “Our goal was an Alliance-compliant integration according to the Asset Administration Shell, which primarily defines Digital Twins. Our various shuttles in the warehouse are physically and—through their Digital Twins—virtually integrated into the overarching cloud architecture of the Alliance. The aim is Predictive Maintenance and the prevention of downtime in warehouse operations.”
“We at Dunkermotoren have focused from the outset on the Alliance architecture as a Tier‑2 supplier and member of the Alliance,” explains Markus Weishaar, Head of IIoT & Service at Dunkermotoren. “At the Hannover Messe, we demonstrated how we would access one of our motors in a GEBHARDT shuttle live via tablet and display the condition data visually – and this is standardized, meaning it is not a demo programmed for exhibition purposes that only works in a specific configuration. At GEBHARDT, the visualization of the condition data, which is standardized and provided through the AAS, occurs directly in Galileo IoT without needing to integrate separate dashboards or similar.”
It is planned that Alliance members Captron, Bizerba, ifm, Pepperl + Fuchs, Phoenix Contact, Sick, and SAP will join the project and expand its scope in areas such as weighing, sensor technology, energy consumption, image processing, and cloud integration.
© Open Industry 4.0 Alliance