DigiIndustry – Digitization and Automation of Industrial Processes
Global coordinator and scientific responsible: José Machado (MEtRICs)
Financed by: IAPMEI, I.P. – Agência para a Competitividade e Inovação (Agendas Mobilizadoras / PRR – PRODUTECH R3), duration :2022-2025, global budget: 34.7 M€; 1.7 M€ to University of Minho
Partners: CCG, UMinho, INEGI, SONAE Arauco, COLEP, STOW Portugal, Microprocessador
Abstract:
The green digital transition affects the manufacturing industry at all levels, from markets and business models, to equipment and workers on the shop floor. Despite changes in purpose and tools, the digitization of manufacturing will be able to enable continuous real digital synchronization and will therefore change production paradigms. Digitalization, as a paradigm, aims to respond to certain challenges of the wood processing industry, such as: many product references highlighting the increasing customization of the product, greater complexity in the production of increasingly smaller series, very demanding quality controls on both raw materials and finished products, defect-free products, and continuous improvement in flexibility, productivity, precision, safety, and sustainability. This requires a combination of technologies and solutions in areas such as flexible automation, modelling and simulation (digital twin), enterprise system integration, IoT, computer vision, location systems, and energy management systems.
In this transformer project we have the following global objectives: (1) Automation of a set of processes, as example, to make the production of wood pellets more efficient and effective; (2) Automatic, flexible, adaptive and intelligent management of warehouses; (3) Energy decarbonization, through the development of an intelligent system for dynamic adjustment of electricity consumption, namely, to present with criteria for optimizing the scheduling and sequencing of production. For the first global objective we have several specific objectives, such as: (1.1) Integration/Interoperability of the flows/processes of the lines and factories that make up the raw board development and coating placement; (1.2) Integration of information, such as: production planning, order, product and equipment; (1.3) Sensing of the equipment, known as physical natives; (1.4) optimization algorithms for production scheduling and sequencing; (1.5) simulation model and representation of industrial processes, namely sequencing between planning and production. For the second objective, we have the following specific objectives: (2.1) Design and development of a customized automatic warehousing system for lines/factories, with the challenge of lifting loads over 8 tons to 30 meters high with a cadence of 18 batches/hour(inbound) and 25 batches/hour(outbound); (2.2) Simulation of the operation of the automatic, flexible and adaptive warehousing System; (2.3) Development of a metallic structure of the innovative Warehouse with profiles adapted the specific characteristics of the products; (2.4) Development of an innovative stacker crane dedicated to the warehousing System; and (2.5) Development of the software that supports the automatic warehouse system, with predictive capacity and to interoperate with the other computer systems. Finally, in the third global objective we have the following specific objective, (3.1) development of an intelligent system of dynamic adjustment of electrical energy consumption.