Once again about the PROXIS conference
With opening of the Ukrainian market, modern information technologies penetrate production. This is not to say that Ukraine was “lagging behind” at one time: the first encyclopedia of cybernetics was once issued in the Ukrainian language, the first domestic computers were designed specifically for production ... However, this was a long history.
On October 8, 2019, a conference was held in the Petrovka district (Pochayna Event Hall) in Kyiv, which attracted a professional audience with the declared theme: "Is the Industrial Internet of Things - technology or marketing?"
IIoT - Industrial IoT - the Industrial Internet of Things, as they say, combination of OT (Operational Technologies - production management technologies) and the IT industry in the form of the fashionable direction of IoT (Internet of things). Such a symbiosis of production and the Internet in the absence of the necessary cybersecurity measures can be costly ... on the other hand, it can have certain advantages.
In fact, the initiative to hold the conference belonged to PROXIS ™ with the slogan "when the choice is obvious." Since PROXIS ™ is an Advantech distributor, their choice is indeed obvious :)
Advantech is one of the world leaders in the production of industrial computers, signal converters, network equipment and, more recently, sensors for industrial systems. Guests from Taiwan were: Daria Wu and Cologne Chen.
From the speeches, it became clear (we must pay tribute - Daria speaks wonderful Russian) that this event is an attempt to build an “ecosystem” - a chain of suppliers and consumers - within the framework of the co-creation philosophy, which can be described by the expression: “tides lift all boats”
Therefore, fellow integrators (ProNet, IT enterprise and System Automation Service) were invited, as well as consumers of solutions: from energy, cybersecurity, and most from industry. Representatives of universities were also interested: KPI (Kiev Polytechnic Institute), NUFT (National University of Food Technologies) and others.
Since open protocols are in used, it is possible to build a common production management system quite flexible - some SRP (Solution Ready Package - ready-made package solutions), which combine HW (hardware) and SW (software) - hardware and software components - are offered by Advantech “from boxes. ”
Colon Chen presented 2 of a whole series of such ready-made solutions from Advantech that could interest Ukrainian entrepreneurs:
1) hardware-software complex to increase the efficiency of energy use in production (FEMS - factory energy management solution)
and
2) solutions for increasing overall production efficiency (OEE - overall equipment effectiveness).
FEMS offers an excellent dashboard report service on the consumption of various resources by production (for energy, in the abbreviation they mean: electrics, water, gas, oil, etc.) At the same time, it is possible to see both the general picture and view consumption graphs in time for individual devices. It is also possible to collect data from touch devices: temperature, pressure, etc. Special attention is paid to risk management: equipment errors, error rate, frequency. In total, more than 20 different types of reports (screens) with the possibility of their settings.
The promised effect reaches 7 - 10% resource savings. Leonid Vitalievich Kantorovich would be envy! ;)
OEE SPR is positioned as a system for "situational rooms" and includes:
а) monitoring equipment for the quality of its work and run-out in order to prevent errors in advance, in order to avoid further simply by timely replacement of parts or assemblies;
b) monitoring the progress of production - tracking the output in relation to the resources used, increasing the effective time of the equipment;
c) product quality control to determine and prevent critical conditions, timely warning of failures, in particular by statistical data processing.
In general, the formula can be described as follows: equipment availability & execution of work & product quality = production productivity!
In the system, you can set various deviations, respectively, to the identified product defects or errors in the equipment, therefore, you can keep the appropriate statistics, and according to the accumulated data, draw certain conclusions about the replacement or reconfiguration of certain nodes.
For different production scales, Advantech offers different sets of equipment and SRP based on personal hardware and software systems (HW + SW).
Starting from the lower levels: product lines ADAM and WISE for registering signals from sensors and WOP as HMI (human-machine interface), data is collected on a SCADA server (supervisory control and data acquisition), built on the basis of different versions of the UNO line, or in the cloud, depending on the load.
In the future, WebAccess provides access to data through a browser, their visualization in the form of dashboards and further inclusion in the enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Advantech products are resistant to harsh conditions that occur in production, while maintaining high productivity and accuracy. WISE-4000 Wireless Solutions reduce cables, which means system deployment time. In general, the company positions its IIoT solutions as a stage in the transition to Industry 4.0
As a result, it was interesting to hear from the participants that the main problem of this new and promising area (IIoT) is that customers of OT solutions do not yet understand why they need this new-mode IIoT. And if the private sector counts money and understands why they need a “response and control”, then it is mainly it that acts as the customer of b2b (business to business) solutions, but the public sector is in no hurry to invest in re-equipment. Potential opportunities for public-private partnerships are still largely discussed.
Solving the problem of cyber defense also resembles a joke about the difference between “pure” mathematicians and applied ones: the former solve problems that they can, as they need, and the latter solve problems that they need, as they can. In this situation, State Special Communication plays for “pure” mathematicians, while private companies rely on “their own” solutions.
Advantech solves the cybersecurity problem due to the unidirectional data flow (from sensors, devices and assemblies), as well as the use of Microsoft cloud technology for large systems. In the end, at that level everything will already depend on integrators.
Advantech also trains staff at least at the user level. This task is superimposed on their partner and distributor - PROXIS ™, which in turn establish cooperation with universities.
The development of such technologies and systems can potentially create jobs for highly qualified personnel, which is why universities are also very interested in cooperation.
And in general, without raising funds for the re-equipment of industries (especially state-owned) to increase their efficiency, it is difficult to imagine achieving an ambitious goal - Ukraine’s GDP growth of 40% over 5 years.
Iaroslav Rozhylo