Project Digital Transformation: real-time planning, control and documentation, supported by EFRE

Ascon Digitale Transformation

Supported by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE) in Rheinland-Pfalz

The “Ascon Digital Transformation” project is intended to enable real-time planning, control and documentation. To this end, the project creates contextually accurate images of reality: images of value flows, material, energy and information flows in production and factory planning, during commissioning, operation, monitoring of plants and production systems as well as in the management of buildings and technical infrastructures and in logistics. The incoming massive signal streams, i.e. events, sensor signals and measurement data e.g. from production are continuously received and stored for each business object.

The mapping of the context in which the data streams acquire their meaning is a central element of the solution. This should have the ability to reflect back analysis results and conclusions and thus influence the system behaviour of a plant or machine in real-time.
The heart of the solution is a massively parallel information processing system, which should deliver results in the range of less than 10ms and which connects the large data streams of the manufacturing world with the data cloud with high performance.

Above all, the solution to be created here is intended to lower the entry hurdles for Industry 4.0, which should increase the chances not only for large companies, but especially for small and medium-sized businesses of realising the digital transformation with existing plants and existing IT systems. In the assembly area, for example, new requirements for a production line can be addressed directly. This then makes it possible to make short-term adjustments to the assembly line, for example to manufacture a new product, and provides the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) with the necessary data for this.

Data analytics solutions can operate at a high level on the behavioural model of the solution. This allows interface problems to be solved and standardisation in production to be supported. In this way, value creation can be controlled instead of just being processed. This allows for intervention possibilities right into the running process, if necessary supplemented by advance and concurrent simulations. Instead of specialists, “normal” personnel is used. The change cycles only take minutes instead of days and weeks as is the case today.