STILL: Secure data exchange in the age of industry 4.0

Networked production processes and digital factories provide an important key to securing Germany’s competitiveness and innovative ability as a business location. For almost three and a half years now, the IC4F (Industrial Communication for Factories) lighthouse project, in which STILL has a major involvement, has been dealing with this topic. The Hamburg-based intralogistics provider also hosted the final event, at which the results achieved with the project partners were presented on October 22nd.

Everyone has been talking about the future project Industry 4.0 for years. However, important tools are still missing to be able to implement the new industry standard in practice. The PAiCE support program (Platforms, Additive Manufacturing, Imaging, Communication, Engineering) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology is intended to remedy this situation. An associated project is the lighthouse project IC4F (Industrial Communications for Factories), in which the Hamburg-based intralogistics company STILL is playing a major role. “Over the past three and a half years, the 15 project partners from industry and research – including Robert Bosch GmbH, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom AG and Nokia – have developed a technology kit for a trustworthy industrial communication and computing infrastructure,” explains Ansgar Bergmann, Project Manager from the Technology & Innovation Department, who was responsible for STILL’s share of the project. This construction kit is based on an open architecture and allows modular extensions for new applications and communication technologies. “The results of our research”, Bergmann continued, “will enable users to select suitable information and communication technologies according to the requirements of an Industry 4.0 as well as a specific migration approach”. The secure, robust and real-time communication solutions for the manufacturing industry use key technologies from the areas of 5G, multi-access edge computing (MEC), cloud computing, virtualization, industrial monitoring and analytics.

Right in the middle instead of just being there

Ansgar Bergmann is particularly proud of the fact that STILL not only “simply took part” in this project, but was able to contribute its expertise fully and decisively to the development. “We were able to profitably draw on our wealth of experience in the fields of industrial networking and Industry 4.0. We have benefited from the fact that we have already helped shape several guidelines for industry in the past on behalf of the Federal Government and the VDMA”, says the STILL expert. On the other hand, the Hamburg intralogistics company was also able to benefit from its participation in the IC4F project. Bergmann: “First of all we proved to ourselves that we have mastered successful networking in the warehouse and that our approaches work. In addition, we were able to gain a lot of new insights which we will now apply profitably for both sides in the cooperation with our customers”.

Live demonstrations illustrate project success

On October 22, this work was provisionally concluded. STILL invited project partners and internal stakeholders to its headquarters on the Elbe. There a mobile radio campus network, necessary for the implementation of the project, has been specially set up by the company Nokia, which will serve as a pioneer for new communication technologies such as 5G. The groundbreaking results of the project work were then presented in several live demonstrations. A live demonstration (“Use Case Truck-to-X Communication”), which was developed mainly by STILL, dealt for example with door control in a factory building. In this use case both forklift trucks and other factory installations were integrated into a common communication environment. The indoor localisation system supplied the position data of the forklift trucks, which were then processed by various applications of the partners involved in the live demonstration. In this example, the door control was done purely from a virtual world. The door opened automatically as soon as a forklift truck approached. The implementation of this door control was implemented as a so-called management shell. For this purpose, digital twins were generated by the forklift and the gate. In the submodels of the management shell, all physical properties of the forklift and the gate were then permanently available. The virtual model, which controlled the processes, was thus continuously able to compare these data and, for example, to open the gate only if the dimensions of the forklift truck really fit through. In addition, the truck’s drive control is accessed and the driver is warned if things get tight. Door damage as it occurs today would thus be a thing of the past.

High customer benefit

All in all, several live demonstrations and a large number of new or extended industrial use cases were shown in Hamburg during the presence event, e.g. the “Bring your Own Network” approach from Siemens for easier installation of multi-tenant networks in companies or the modern “Certificate Management via the Cloud” from Telekom, which increases both security and convenience in the field of industrial communication. “These proof-of-concept implementations serve to verify the methodology and validate the use cases,” says Ansgar Bergmann. The STILL expert is firmly convinced that much of the knowledge and experience gained from the IC4F project will later flow into industrial applications and be of great benefit to STILL customers. “With this experience behind us, we are the ideal partner when it comes to industrial 4.0 topics or warehouse networking,” Ansgar Bergmann is sure.

For more information, please visit: https://www.still.de/