The SMART-MOLD project focuses on developing an open, innovative, highly scalable platform that enables the collection, analysis, and utilization of data from plastic molding machines.
By leveraging modern IoT technologies, advanced data analytics and machine learning, the platform aims to optimize manufacturing processes, reduce waste, and improve product quality in the plastics industry. Specific objectives of the project include:
- Capture critical process parameters such as temperature, pressure, cycle time, material flow, energy consumption and machine utilization in real time.
- Capture additional manufacturing process data such as planned/unplanned downtimes, work orders, errors, floor temperatures, etc.
- Establish a scalable and open cloud-based platform where data from multiple machines, production lines, and facilities can be securely stored, aggregated, and accessed by authorized users.
- Provide pre-built analytics and visualizations for key performance metrics and provide open framework for further development. Provide access to dashboards, alerts and maintenance insights to enhance operational decision-making.
- Enable the platform to utilize historical and real-time data for development, training, deployment and governance of the machine learning models. These models can predict potential issues, optimize production parameters, and enhance quality control through anomaly detection, defect prediction and image recognition.
The ultimate vision of the project is to create a smarter, more efficient, and sustainable plastics manufacturing ecosystem. By empowering businesses with data-driven insights and machine learning capabilities, the platform will serve as a catalyst for digital transformation, process optimization, energy and material consumption reduction, plastic waste reduction and better resource utilization.
