IDM Automation in the Cosmopack S.M.A.R.T. Area

The evolution of ELECTRIC: Thus IDM Automation Srl presented itself at the 2019 edition of Cosmopack, bringing to the fair the e-MF302, a fully electric plastic and glass bottle filling machine, which integrates two Mitsubishi scara robots, one dedicated to loading and one to unloading of the bottles.

A series of additional pluses characterize the model compared to previous versions: more performant, more environmentally friendly thanks to reduced energy consumption, quiet for greater working comfort, "full glass" protection for better functionality and ease of use.

«Everything starts in practice from our constant propensity for research and experimentation»,  IvanRiboni  (IDM Automation Ceo) begins, «which is also guiding us towards new developments, in line with the parameters of Industry 4.0».
This is the case of the IDMind project, born from the development of the New Technology Dept. Thanks to this project, IDM presented a production telemetry service and proactive support, called Machine.Care.

«In practice - Riboni sums up - we clearly defined our idea of predictive maintenance, with a solution based on a "client side" App and a "manufacturer side" dashboard, which enables interventions on the machine to be managed in an organized and optimized way and can be activated both on new machines and on all those supplied up to now. In other words, Machine.Care is a data tracking solution, able to create a maintenance history to be sent both to third-party MES/ERP management systems, to the dedicated portal and app primarily for ordinary and extraordinary maintenance».
 
Data "for" all ... but not "belonging to" all
Andrea Radaelli, IDMind project manager, speaks about Industry 4.0 as a puzzle of various technologies, for a detailed analysis of the solution.
«The idea of having to manage a growing amount of information can be tricky, if users are not shown that some systems can offer tangible and significant advantages. This is why the approach we adopted was to work on a user-friendly presentation of information, developing clear, accessible, immediately useful and usable tools. Tools - reiterates Radaelli - able to create an objective awareness on the functioning of the machines, through notifications that can reach the user in a simple and useful way on different devices, such as a mobile phone.

This means that every single IDM machine has the Machine.Care concept in its heart, so the signaling of the symptom or problem is generated by the machine itself, removing the human factor from the equation, not because it is useless but because it could create non objective “ sensations", which would invalidate the efficiency of the intervention on the machine itself».

Once the possibility of error in identifying a malfunction over time has been eliminated, and with a greater amount of information available, a sort of predictivity is generated ... «and I say "sort of" because true artificial intelligence is something else».
Increasingly aware of the real value of data and their management, companies are, moreover, less and less inclined to share them in the "cloud" and therefore «the approach we adopted was not to "take out data" from companies, following the concept of On-Site-Cloud, which allows our customers to have all the benefits of the App and the cloud, but whose starting point is their home base. And data security, in this case is implicit, because the object that we use as a manager of incoming and outgoing data is guaranteed at the origin».

«The intent of IDM - intervenes again Riboni - was precisely to equip our machines with a system capable of offering immediate help to the customer, while the most sensitive data is instead transmitted to other systems to be processed in a more structured way. We could say that we have contributed to creating a link between two worlds which, by their very nature, do not normally speak with each other but which now must necessarily collaborate. Only those who know the machine can send data correctly to those who do not have this competence, because developers of management programs such as MES or ERP are not PLC programmers ... they have different DNA ».

The greater efficiency in identifying the malfunctioning of a machine at the origin obviously allows to drastically decrease the production stops because, in fact, Machine.Care was born not to "heal" the machine but to monitor it and not make it "feel bad" . A concept that customers have received positively, especially appreciating its concreteness.