The Opificio Digitale project (OD-SME) aims to develop new digital solutions for process innovation and to offer innovative products and services in an Industry 4.0 context.

OD-SME is a project worth € 13 million, co-financed by the Sustainable Growth Fund of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, with Wärtsilä Italia heading up a team that includes Area Science Park, Ernst & Young and CNR-Istituto Officina dei Materiali. Opificio Digitale was founded to help largescale industrial manufacturing to develop new products and digital services, which can also be adopted by associated small and medium enterprises and other chains of production. The idea is to establish an advanced production plant, founded on an open industrial operational system that connects all actors in a single chain. A “decentralised factory” that involves suppliers, companies and customers, enabling sharing of information and data.

PHASES

During trial phases, an initial practical case study for the platform will be the production process of an engine, i.e. the working and pre-assembly of the cylinder head, piston rod and big end, assembly of the engine and the testing and start-up phase. The solutions adopted will be integrated into company production processes and proposed to the Wärtsilä production chain, with the medium/long-term goal of transferring the technology developed to production processes. The expected benefits of the industrial process are greater flexibility, speed, productivity, less errors and stoppages, improved quality and reduced production waste, and a more competitive product. The R&D activity and solutions tested and validated may subsequently be transferred to other sectors.

THE TECHNOLOGY

The OD-SME ecosystem is a technological system with five integrated modules:

• a software & hardware architecture for smart data acquisition and analytics
• an open-source software platform for smart manufacturing, to manage process data within and external to the factory and the configuration of innovative production systems capable of generating value from the data
• a platform that will help to develop applications based on artificial intelligence algorithms
• a series of additional modules adaptable to different manufacturing contexts, with the aim of certifying the supply and quality of semi-finished products/products in the supply chain
• a module for interoperability with different augmented/virtual reality hardware platforms and tools in order to simplify training and improve worker safety.

The ecosystem as a whole will be capable of transforming any workstation (be it a machine tool, robot or physical workstation) into a “digital workstation”, capable of exchanging information with the operator and tracking production progress

Martina Terconi
Enterprise Digitisation Unit 
Area Science Park
martina.terconi@areasciencepark.it