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164 IoT Applications — Value Creation for Industry
interoperability of devices. This means that the ambient assistance aspect of
the IoT is the one that will be the basis for optimization of future factory
processes and that will lead to a number of use cases. Future factory concepts
based on the IoT will need to be human centered. The core element is to release
the human operator, engineer or manager from doing routine work. Instead
humans will be able to concentrate on their unique capability of defining the
right strategy and defining the right goals to operate the factory effectively
within the triangle of tension between costs, quality and output.
In this context the ambient intelligence aspect gets a new meaning.
Following the nature of the IoT of making information available, ambient
intelligence is the instrument to release the human from routine tasks concerning
information retrieval and analysis. Autonomous behavior results from the
defined reaction of equipment or infrastructure to the results of this analysis.
So autonomy of equipment is no contradiction to the need of deterministic
behavior at all.
3.3.2 The SmartFactory KL Initiative
In order to transfer the central paradigms of the IoT to factory automation,
many technologies working well in the consumer world have to be applied
under industrial conditions. One of the biggest obstacles keeping responsibles
away from the application of new technologies is missing trust and the lack
of best practice examples.
For this reason in 2004, a group of people from industry and academia
met and formulated the vision of a smart factory of the future. After feasibility
study the technology initiative SmartFactory KL was founded in 2005 as a public
private partnership. Its target is to develop, apply and distribute innovative
industrial plant technology. The founding partners represented various industry
sectors. Meanwhile the number of partners has grown up to 22, including
mainly partners from industry as well as universities and research centers. The
funding is based on membership fees and public research projects given by
German ministries and the EU [10].
The basic equipment of the SmartFactory KL is an automated production
facility for liquid colored soap (Figure 3.4). It contains a process manufacturing
part as well as a piece handling part. Based on state of the art automation
technology the equipment demonstrates the migration path to the application