MACHINAIDE collaboration fuels digital twin innovation for the smart factory

Konecranes collaborated with a consortium of partners from other industries to improve digital twin interoperability and develop new smart factory services. Customers are already benefiting from the results.

As the smart factory becomes a reality in many industries, the development of digital twins has emerged as an important focus area for Konecranes.

Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical equipment. They can be used to simulate and boost performance, optimize maintenance and improve safety. The use of digital twins is rapidly becoming more widespread as companies recognize their benefits.

One of the main challenges in smart factory environments is ensuring interoperability between different systems. Many industrial environments use equipment from multiple manufacturers. For digital twins to work successfully in the smart factory, machinery needs to communicate through common protocols.

Another challenge lies in how to keep digital twins updated as machinery evolves over its lifecycle. The digital twin needs to reflect any new features or other building blocks added to the equipment, including physical upgrades, parameter changes and adaptations to the working process itself.

Significantly, the development and communication principles for digital twins are often the same – regardless of the industry – so there’s an opportunity for equipment manufacturers to work together on defining the direction for digital twin development and smart factory ecosystems.

This is what Konecranes has been doing through its leading role in the MACHINAIDE research project, which brought together a consortium of 19 academic and industrial entities from Finland, the Netherlands, South Korea and Turkey. Between 2019 and 2023, the consortium worked on a series of digital twin use cases with the aim of improving interoperability, defining new business models and developing new services.

"Even when companies operate in different industries, their digital twin needs are quite similar. The concepts around smart factory development are universal,” says Konecranes Product Manager Valtteri Peltoranta, an expert in crane lifecycle data and predictive maintenance.

“By working with partners from other industries and countries, we can find the best methods for developing digital twin solutions,” he says. “Our aim with the MACHINAIDE project was to enable all the features and services we need for properly integrating Konecranes solutions with our customers’ smart factory ecosystems.”

Open platform communications for cranes takes a leap forward

Konecranes’ targets were specifically around the development of digital twin interfaces and data flows to support communication between factory equipment from different suppliers. This requires careful study of how data is collected, processed and analyzed. The team also wanted to explore the interaction between people and machines, with the aim of improving functionality and safety.

A lot of Konecranes’ work in the project focused on developing a crane-optimized Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) solution for the smart factory environment. The OPC-UA protocol is specifically designed for industrial automation and the reliable exchange of data between different types of devices and systems.

“Konecranes used many work hours within MACHINAIDE together with partner companies to create a crane-optimized OPC-UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) solution that can be introduced to the market. There is already a pilot customer using it in a process crane application,” says Konecranes Senior Research Specialist Heikki Mesiä, who led the MACHINAIDE Consortium.

“A digital twin is not only for operating a machine through a UI interface, but also about using all the data we gather throughout the machine’s lifecycle. We have the maintenance record, the history of how the customer has been using the crane, what kind of parts have been replaced, and so on. All this data can be used to make smarter maintenance decisions that improve the end-customer’s process,” says Mesiä.

Konecranes’ collaboration within MACHINAIDE has also led to the development of several APIs (Application Programming Interface) that allow customers to connect their factory data with Konecranes equipment and services. Part of the work for the Konecranes TRUCONNECT API was done through MACHINAIDE. The digital twin’s real-time data flow can be connected to the ecosystem of the factory and other machines through OPC UA, while the digital twin’s lifecycle data flow is connected to the ecosystem through the APIs.

“More and more customers are asking us for information on service task records, fault reports and other maintenance metrics. This is what the APIs are for,” says Peltoranta. “As service data is stored in our own systems, we can now provide these API solutions to the customer so they can get the same data in their system too.”

Industry and academia come together

The project was divided into work packages assigned to each of the different consortium partners, who approached the use cases from the perspectives of material handling, 3D metal printing and production-process optimization. There was also input from the principles of automation in the dairy industry.

The partners met face-to-face in Finland at the start of 2020. This would be their only opportunity to do so before Covid-19 travel restrictions came into force.

“If we’d kicked off just one week later, we would not have been able to meet in person. But thanks to that meeting we established a process for working and following up on the progress with regular Teams meetings. We were remarkably effective – the final review showed that all the targets were met,” says Mesiä. He’s been working on Konecranes’ research and innovation in projects with external partners for some 15 years.

One such partner is Aalto University, home to the Ilmatar Open Innovation Environment. Here engineering students can do experiments with a Konecranes overhead crane. The environment was also used for much of Konecranes’ and Aalto University’s joint work on the MACHINAIDE project. A research team from the university is currently working on developing an open solution for linking digital twins from different service providers.

“Three years ago, nobody in Finland had a PhD in digital twin technology, but soon there will be four people with this credential,” says Mesiä. “By working with the university we’re able to develop expertise that brings benefits to our business later.”

Konecranes is now feeding the results from MACHINAIDE into its Zero4 program, which aims to boost industrial productivity by zeroing down material flow information barriers, GHG emissions, wasted energy and safety incidents. The program focuses on developing a unified material flow platform together with ecosystem partners, universities, research institutes and customers. Zero4 is part of Konecranes’ broader drive to become the world leader in material handling solutions, creating value for everyone.

 

 

The MACHINAIDE project grew out of ITEA, a European R&D program that promotes software innovation through cross-border collaboration. ITEA brings together industry, academia and government organizations from different countries to address challenges in software architecture, systems integration and testing. By collaborating with other organizations through the ITEA program, Konecranes can leverage expertise and resources to drive growth and competitiveness in our business.