"Adaptive manufacturing benefits greatly from interoperability"

Automation technology can make an important contribution to improved sustainability and resource efficiency. B&R sees adaptive manufacturing as an effective lever and intends to drive this forward with innovations. Especially in an IoT and cloud environment, this requires standardization and interoperability of software as well as moving away from proprietary systems. In this interview, Florian Schneeberger, CTO at B&R, explains the details.

Florian Schneeberger: Software now plays a crucial role. A good example is adaptive manufacturing. Here, we invest a lot in mechatronics and robotics but the software share is very high. Software is also becoming increasingly important in the integration of IT and OT. That's why we're investing to deliver powerful IoT (Internet of Things) solutions. Building on this, our customers can very easily build platforms around their products and thus increase their competitiveness. Our expertise here is to generate the relevant data and merge it into IoT applications. In doing so, we also process proprietary data protocols, but subsequently make all data available via standard protocols such as OPC UA. In other words: We see ourselves here as a data provider.

Schneeberger: Such platforms are the domain of our customers – our focus is primarily on standardization. In an IoT and cloud environment, proprietary systems have no future; interoperability is much more important. Adaptive manufacturing in particular benefits from this – it is necessary to be able to connect systems from multiple suppliers.

Schneeberger: Take our ACOPOStrak transport system. Here, we want to offer our customers applications for predictive maintenance that can be used to record the wear and tear of the rollers and evaluate it using machine learning, for example. This ensures the reliability of our systems and prevents an unexpected production stop.

Schneeberger: No company will be able to avoid AI, but we have to keep a close eye on the use of such systems in terms of integrity and ethics. AI will certainly play a significant role in software generation in the future. It is conceivable that the code will then also be further optimized by AI via simulation with a digital twin – this is very exciting and will also come very quickly.

Schneeberger: AI will not be able to replace software developers – in the end, someone with understanding must be able to structure and check the result. In addition, it will be more a matter of simplifying the programming of the systems and putting operation in context. The shortage of skilled workers can be countered very effectively by avoiding repetitive tasks, however. This was exactly the approach we took when developing mapp Technology. It facilitates the creation of machine and plant software via easy-to-use apps. Instead of programming line by line, the developer simply configures the already finished mapp components.

Schneeberger: Absolutely. Our parent company ABB has also made a clear decision to strategically position itself in the direction of electrification and away from fossil fuels. B&R's concrete goal is to constantly minimize the environmental footprint of our solutions, which includes tuning firmware to use as little energy as possible. Above all, the user will benefit.

Last but not least – and here we come full circle back to adaptive manufacturing – we are working together with our customers on more flexible and smaller production cells that can thus be closer to customers' locations. And one of the keys to such adaptive manufacturing solutions is automation technology, which also opens up potential in terms of resource efficiency. That's why we have anchored the topic of sustainability very strongly in our organization – also a very strong motivation for our employees. It's not just about making machines better and faster – more sustainable manufacturing is in everyone's interest.

Thank you very much for the interview, Mr. Schneeberger.

The interview is from the magazine KEM Construction, Issue 6/2023. Published with the kind permission of Konradin-Verlag.