By Takao Mizutani, Senior Manager, Fujitsu Limited
Approval by the Industrial Internet Consortium of Fujitsu's proposed IoT testbed, the Factory Operations Visibility and Intelligence model, is a great milestone for Fujitsu, and, we believe, the manufacturing industry as well. We anticipate that this will spur manufacturing on to increasingly take advantage of the benefits of IoT. As an IIC testbed, companies with various technologies will be able to develop added value, such as, for example, analysis functions for making production lines more efficient.
In developing this model our theme was to bring visibility to production facilities. It does this by using the cloud to integrate a variety of data, such as operating information captured in real time from sensors attached to equipment, as well as related production plans and work results.
Fujitsu designed this testbed so that multiple companies, each in their own specialized fields, can collaborate and build an ecosystem of sensors, analytic applications, and other technologies. Through field trials and actual operations, Fujitsu aims to strengthen these solutions to respond to the diverse needs of customers.
The testbed will be exhibited at the Industrial Internet Consortium booth in the testbed demonstration area of the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona, to be held September 16-18, 2015.
About the New Testbed
Fujitsu proposed its IoT solution model based on our field trails and know-how gained at Fujitsu I-Network Systems Limited's Yamanashi Plant and the production facilities of Shimane Fujitsu Limited. The new testbed will use IoT to make it easy to bring visibility to production facilities, to enhance worksite activities and raise motivation toward work, and to quickly evaluate the effects of cost reductions.
Fujitsu will be making efforts, with many other companies, to continue evaluating field trials, planning a common architecture, and building and testing prototypes, to create a testbed with high interoperability which customers can test in a short period. Furthermore, we aim to strength solutions to respond to all types of needs, incorporating the know-how gained from these efforts.
Factory Visualization through IoT
The testbed is designed to collect sensor data generated on the factory floor, production-equipment logs, production plans and statistics, operator information, and to integrate all this and other related information in the cloud. In this way the testbed can be used to bring visibility to production facilities, analyze and predict outcomes, and support better decisions for improvements. Because the current status can be digitally shared with all relevant people, it is possible to speed up improvement tests on the spot, and to propose optimal methods based on comparisons with other departments or factories. In this way it can be used to dramatically reduce operator-hours for automated production processes in small-lot manufacturing, or for manual processes in product reworks, as well as contribute to creating optimal team organization and human resource development.
Diagram of the FOVI Testbed
Learn more about FOVI at www.iiconsortium.org/fovi.