Digitizing a Distributed Textile Production Process using Industrial Internet of Things: A Use-Case

IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS), pp. 315–320

Abstract

Many textile production chains are highly fragmented and distributed over several locations and countries. Textile machinery usually relies on proprietary software and hardware that cannot be sufficiently interlinked. As a result, machine and product data is not comprehensively collected and analyzed across the whole production process. Thus, the potential of Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 is often not fully exploited in the textile industry. In recent years, vendor-independent machine to machine communication protocols and standards, such as OPC UA and MQTT have been suggested for the digitization of production facilities by integrating or replacing these proprietary systems. In contrast, there is still a lack of publicly available working demonstrations and exemplary implementations in the textile context. In this paper, we use Industrial Internet of Things technologies to design an open digital infrastructure for textile manufacturing. We develop our approach based on a production use-case that is distributed across multiple locations. By machine networking and integrating information flows from the shop floor to the cloud, we lay the basis for getting most value out of process-wide collected data. Our suggested infrastructure supports the use of Machine Learning techniques to enable various Smart Manufacturing applications, such as Predictive Maintenance and Predictive Quality.

Authors 4

1. Michael Rath Aachen Chair of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Aymen Gannouni Aachen Chair of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Daniel Lütticke Aachen Chair of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

4. Thomas Gries Aachen Institute of Textile Technology

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Textile Technology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany