New opportunities for improving production efficiency and maintenance

Industrial internet is described as a new industrial revolution in which digital systems combine physical machines to each other and to the internet. However, for the operators and maintenance professionals in manufacturing sector the applications of industrial internet entail also challenges, such as:

• Treatment and analysis of existing data
• Complexity of technical systems and resulting challenges in maintenance and operation
• Requirements of deep understanding of various new competences, such as decision support systems, data collection, big data analytics and artificial intelligence
• Long life cycles of production equipment and the changes in the equipment during the life cycle
• New requirements in the maintenance of Cyber-Physical Systems compared to traditional systems

Table 1. Architecture of Cyber-Physical systems: applications of different levels (applied from Lee et al. 2015). In Finnish.

There are also changes in the value creation of industrial internet related services. The new value creation is based on the enormous amounts of information available from the systems and machinery, and its analysis and utilisation for real-time, automatic decision-making. Even though the competitiveness of companies is more and more based on collecting and combining information and transforming it into digital services, the opportunities of cyber-physical systems have been utilised at varying levels in Finnish manufacturing companies. Nevertheless, companies should assess the life cycle costs and benefits of cyber-physical systems, as their customers are mainly interested in their benefits such as new kinds of services and operation support.

The full article (in Finnish) "Tuotantotehokkuuden ja kunnossapidon kehittämisen uudet mahdollisuudet" written by Helena Kortelainen, Jyri Hanski and Teuvo Uusitalo from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland was published in Promaint 2/2016. It will be available online here.