Well-designed environments help to accurately measure manufacturing processes. Often the things that can be measured include overall equipment efficiency, performance, manufacturing time, tooling changes, utilisation, achievement of schedule or production targets, maintenance and delivery issues (e.g. return rate or delivery time).
The data can therefore be used for more cost-effective and energy-efficient manufacturing. It can also be used to predict things like repair needs or production problems, and to simulate manufacturing processes or even energy consumption in advance. In addition, data plays an important role in quality monitoring. It is impossible to assess the quality of a product and a production process without good quality data.
Manufacturing as a Service concepts are rapidly gaining ground. This requires companies to share data in a secure, appropriate and mutually beneficial way, which can be very difficult. Measuring the entire production chain is also gradually becoming more and more important, for example to monitor the carbon footprint of manufacturing.
Exploiting data remains a challenge for both research institutions and the business sector. TAMK’s
he FairDatAct team aims to develop its own research capacity and training and provide concrete examples of solutions to accelerate the uptake of data in business sectors.
What will the project do?
FieldLab provides a framework for TAMK’s research. The FieldLab will be equipped with a wide range of equipment for manufacturing industry, a 5G network, as well as licenses and software to collect and visualise data.
The themes of the project are:
- Exploiting open access solutions for data collection (e.g. mobile robots, 3D printing)
- Demonstrating the benefits of the 5G network
- User interface solutions for data visualisation
- Measuring the factory environment