(375b) Findings and Conclusions from a Mobile Worker and Augmented Reality Enabled Continuous Manufacturing Skid Project.

This abstract presents the final conclusions regarding a project initially presented at AIChE 2021 Spring Meeting as an oral presentation (abstract#618949) and poster (abstract#623026).

Background:

Manufacturing USA was created in 2014 to secure U.S. global leadership in advanced manufacturing by connecting people, ideas, and technology. Manufacturing USA institutes convene business competitors, academic institutions, and other stakeholders to test applications of new technology, create new products, reduce cost and risk, and enable the manufacturing workforce with the skills of the future (www.manufacturingusa.com).

MxD encourages factories across the United States to deploy digital manufacturing and design technologies, so those factories can become more efficient and cost-competitive (www.mxdusa.org).

Project detail:

This abstract relates to a continuous process manufacturing skid that has a focus on mobile workers and demonstrates the future of manufacturing by using a digital twin enabled physical skid build. The question the skid answers is "How would you visualize sensor data with the best User Interface/User Experience design to get a seamless experience in continuous manufacturing?"

The findings and conclusions come from a project team consisting of an government owned site personnel, a private chemical processing company, a multi-national technology supplier and multiple service providers. Equipment and assets applied in the project go from sensors to process equipment to pumps/drives to valves to a DCS to a MES and complete engineering and design suite and finally to an IT/OT-integrated and IIoT-enabled setup to support day-to-day operations and mobile workers. Cloud platform with Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning capabilities is connected to the site and the skid.

Currently there is considerable work done in chemical industry to study the current state and possible future states when it comes to skids, processes, plants, companies, professionals, workers and value chains. Applying novel techniques into operations is in practice an efficient way for human beings to get a real grasp on what is impacted, how it is impacted and what do we want to do with the novel capabilities that come from innovation areas such as the wider digital enterprise or industry 4.0 concept. Concrete studies like this one bring important contributions to the field, especially when introduced as an example in a discussion or presentation at an event such as the AIChE Annual Meeting.

The subject of this abstract was originally planned and divulged in 2019, moved into a contractual obligation in 2020 and is scheduled to conclude in summer of 2021. This timeline allows the authors to go through the whole lifecycle from problem statement to selected methods to real physical results and finally to discuss and expand the implications for future ways of working.

The audience will learn about augmented reality and digital twin use cases around a continuous process testbed. The audience will understand that this skid is available for industry professionals and students to visit at a public facility on Goose Island, Chicago.

Use Cases:

The goal of the process industry test bed skid (physical) and its digital twin (virtual) is to enable field operators, engineers, factory managers, and other key manufacturing roles to gain data-driven insights for increased operational awareness in order to better solve manufacturing problems and optimize processes. A factory manager should be able to communicate with and assign tasks to the mobile worker and view all data necessary to make informed decisions about the assignment of tasks. The solution will be demonstrated using the process test bed and should be agnostic to sensor type, analytics solution, and control type. Visualization of this data should include, but is not limited to, dashboards for factory managers and augmented reality technology for field operation using mobile devices (e.g. tablet and smart glasses).

Conclusions: The three authors of the abstract will each share their findings from their viewpoint, those being the viewpoints of an owner/operator company, the production site and the main technology provider.