Higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in 48 hours with state-of-the-art IoT tools and real production data: around 100 participants from 14 countries succeeded in achieving this goal at the Bosch ConnectedExperience Manufacturing Hackathon. The venue for BCX17, which attracted 500 visitors in total, was STATION Berlin, in whose creative atmosphere the Bosch ConnectedWorld IoT conference took place at the same time from March 15-16.
For their work in the three classic OEE fields of performance, availability and quality, "hack master" Janette Kothe offered the 14 teams concrete data sources from real life. Such as the digital clone of a machine module exhibited at the BCW of a packaging line from WestRock, real machine data from hydraulic production or real-time recordings from the i4.0-compatible Nexo handheld nutrunner.
On the tool side, Bosch Rexroth made a complete connectivity stack available to the teams. At the center: the Rexroth IoT gateway that can be configured in only five minutes and collects sensor and machine data without any influence on the existing automation logic and forwards it to a higher-level analysis tool.
For the evaluation, visualization and initiation of measures, for example for predictive maintenance, the participants used either the Production Performance Manager from Bosch Software Innovations that is available with the IoT gateway as a starter kit or the Predix cloud platform from GE Digital. At the "bottom" data level, the teams benefited from the most modern sensors in addition to the corresponding platforms such as SICK AppSpace or Bosch Sensor Cloud. A team from Accenture supported the conceptual development of the use cases with design thinking. The other 14 hack enablers included Amazon WebServices, Axway and the Eclipse Foundation, among others.
The teams "SICK Fridge" and "HYDRA – Hydraulic Data Realtime Analysis" were chosen as the winners of the Hack Challenge Manufacturing. The task of "HYDRA" was to evaluate in real time the data of a hydraulic test bench recorded via IoT gateway using PPM and Predix in order to optimize availability and maintenance cycles. The team from Hack Partner GE Digital received a special prize for their Predix implementation.
The second winning team, SICK Fridge, playfully worked through the topics of availability and product quality. In order to always have a certain range of well-chilled drinks on hand, the project monitored the fridge at the Manufacturing Hack Area in real time using camera and temperature sensors. The smart fridge could therefore communicate when and how much each product had to be refilled.
"Everyone had fun at the event and it showed once again how quickly the Connected Automation Portfolio from Bosch Rexroth and the solutions displayed from the wide partner ecosystem can be transformed into concrete use cases," summarized Hack MC Janette Kothe, Technical Sales Support for Industry 4.0 at Bosch Rexroth. "In addition, the hackathon makes clear the importance of cooperation in the areas of IoT and Industry 4.0, which can only be overcome together."
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