The first workshop of the Italian Technology Cluster “Intelligent Factories” was held yesterday at the Polytechnic in Milan. The Italian Technology Cluster is an association that involves enterprises, universities, research centres, entrepreneurial association, technological districts and other stakeholders operating in the manufacturing and intelligent factory sectors. During the event, the theme “strategies and management for the production systems of the next generation” was debated. In particular, Roberto Lazzarini of Carpigiani (company that produces appliances for the Italian ice cream) and Cesare Stefanelli (University of Ferrara) have shown a solution about the services that Carpigiani can offer customers by using the digital technologies. It’s a system that allows to remotely control the efficiency and use of the machine and simplifies the maintenance activities. It’s a solution that can include four types of services: Care Plus (it prevents the risk of breakage or downtime), Safety Plus (it ensures safety in the treatment of the ice cream), Efficiency Plus (it intelligently manages refills and cleaning) and Energy Plus (it avoids energy wastage). Thus, it’s possible to move from simply providing products to offering products and services.
Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli (Polytechnic Bari) spoke instead about open innovation and industry 4.0, highlighting the role of crowdsourcing and innovation mall to allow companies to find referents who can offer solutions to specific problems, facilitating the innovation, reducing costs and risks, and creating synergies. Besides, Andrea Loleo (Siemens) presented during his speech the MindSphere solution, the cloud-based, open IoT operating system from Siemens. It is implementable within a very short period of time: designed as an open operating system for the Internet of Things, this platform makes it possible to improve the efficiency of plants by recording and analyzing large volumes of production data.
