Digital transformation of glass industry: The adaptive enterprise

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the related terms, Smart Manufacturing, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Industry 4.0, attract significant interest in the chemical manufacturing industry. Such technologies, which include in-Cloud data storage, large scale computation, advanced control, enterprise-wide-optimization, and machine-learning, offer opportunities for improved production management, rapid proto-typing, and lower cost. This paper describes the application and proof of concept (POC) of the Vitro base-architecture for Smart Manufacture. Benchmarking against current technology showed that the engineering time required for data reconciliation, rectification, and standardization is significantly reduced. Instead of spending 80% of their efforts on such activities, process engineers and data scientists started to spend most of their time on real-time process analysis and decision making. The cloud-based architecture used to support the development was developed under a cooperative project between Vitro and Microsoft. The architecture can be applied to other industry sectors, such as the chemicals, petro-chemicals, pharmaceutical, agricultural, and metallurgical industries. The current paper describes the data management component of the project. It describes the standardized storage formats used for uniform display of rectified process data in engineering units. We found that the MS Azure based system provides operators, process engineers, and managers alike, the data needed to run the process at or close to optimal conditions minute by minute, day by day, and week by week as product portfolios and markets change. In a follow-up paper we will describe how the approach facilitates application of APC such adaptive MPC, real time optimization, and adaptive decision-making. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.