Division Supply Chain Services at Fraunhofer IISIndustry 4.0 in drive technology
As digitalisation and automation progress in Industry 4.0, the demand for intelligent, efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly drive solutions has risen rapidly. Data in particular is increasingly being used as a tool to generate customer-specific and target group-orientated benefits as well as ecological and social added value. Digitally controlled and networked electric drives have become the central interface between the real and digital worlds thanks to the combination of communication and actuators and are virtually irreplaceable in many industrial applications such as mechanical engineering, production and logistics.
Until now, however, it has only been possible to combine drives from different manufacturers in a meaningful way in terms of data and to realise their full potential benefits at great expense. By establishing interoperable access to information and functions for drive manufacturers, machine and system manufacturers as well as machine and system operators, new forward-looking use cases can be developed and existing business models revolutionised.
In addition to the technical and data-based evolution, the realisation of the vision of a ‘Drive 4.0’ also requires the establishment of an appropriate digital ecosystem. The integration of various players and objects within the ecosystem is therefore an important driver for the holistic digitalisation of production and the creation of new value creation potential through pioneering data-based services.
To this end, a federated Drive 4.0 data room is being developed, which, in addition to a central component (entry point for users, data and service catalogue), provides fully decentralised data storage at the respective data owner (operator, system and drive manufacturer) in conjunction with fine-grained rights management, ensuring the data sovereignty of the parties involved from the design phase of the data room onwards. The data itself remains with the respective participants. Only metadata and links to the actual data set are freely exchanged in the data room; access authorisations are managed on a decentralised basis. In the project, dynamic data and (static) asset administration shells (AAS) of the local drives, administration shells of the plant manufacturers and those of the drive manufacturers are described with common semantics and integrated into the data room so that they can be used by manufacturer-independent services. One such service could, for example, be a tool for the energy-efficient design of drives.