Industry 4.0: flexis at HMI

Visit us at the Hanover Fair between April 25 and April 29. You will find us in Hall 17 at booth C18.

How does "Industry 4.0" change production and how does this affect the world of work? The research project IWEPRO at the Hanover Fair 2016 shows how flexible tasks and activities of employees are redefined in networked production, using the example of transmission production. The project addresses different areas of activity along a process chain from production planning through to work on the individual machines, which are made more transparent, effective and employee-friendly with industry 4.0. At the same time it demonstrates how industry 4.0 enables manufacturing companies to efficiently implement production planning change requirements for individual orders.

Employees are supported in this demo scenario in the planning, monitoring and flexible re-planning of machine utilization. Traditional centralized utilization planning is complemented by autonomously acting software agents, which, based on the situation, adapt prebuilt plans and support workers in the plan implementations. Virtual machine tools allow machine programmers to virtually run through prepared machining processes in physically correct simulations before they are executed on the real machine. Delays and costs, which result from production errors and equipment failures, are avoided this way. Logistics specialists who organize and implement the transport of the workpieces between the processing stations receive support through intelligent transport systems, which, depending on the situation, select the optimal means of transport among existing ones. They send, if necessary, autonomous, driverless companions (FTS) on the way and provide the machine operators, who make manual transports, via mobile devices, with detailed information about the transport orders. They also provide routing in the same way as a mobile navigation system.

Partners in the consortium of IWEPRO, in addition to flexis, are the Adam Opel AG, DMG Electronics GmbH, SafeLog GmbH, SimPlan AG, and TAGnology Systems GmbH, as well as the research institutes Fraunhofer IPK and Sociological Research Institute Göttingen (SOFI) e.V.