List of questions

How to create a methodology to develop projects in the integrated and digitized industry environment; and create a complete environment for the development of integrated projects; and develop general and strong professionals in development and concepts to navigate this environment?

Akaer was granted recently a federal grant in Brazil for a development project aimed to transform the company in a smart manufacturing environment and a tier one supplier for the aerospace industry worldwide. This project has a five years horizon. Our main goal now is to define how the plant environment should be and how to prepare our people to thrive in this environment.

How to reduce the volume (in quantity and non-recurring investments) of tooling, developing new solutions to be configured or adjusted for different products and configurations. Eliminating the need to manufacture different tooling for each product, but developing instead tooling that assume different geometries and settings in the area of production / integration?

Still related to the smart manufacturing environment to be created at Akaer, this question is more related to the manufacturing processes themselves.

What are the data mining technologies available through the Smart Industries Institute to integrate and optimize CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools and Business Intelligence portals and web places ? How could this technologies improve our Customer Experience and enhance our business competitiveness to a higher level?

No background information available

What are the existing approaches and technologies in practice related to Smart Mining initiatives within the Smart Industries context?

No background information available

When it comes to knowledge representation in heterogeneous sensor networks, ontology engineering and other semantical approaches (e.g. semantic mapping) have been investigated for the sake of not only providing systems interoperability, but also of allowing human interpretability and decision support. Deep neural networks (DNN) on the other hand are methods that automatically learn efficient inter-domain data representations. Which benefits the merging of standard ontological knowledge representations and mapping with DNN methods can bring to the design and control of future heterogeneous sensor networks?

Key words: knowledge representation; IoT applications

To which extent the modeling and automatic identification of emotional/affective states can result in innovations for human-machine interactions that lead to increased user trust/confidence in autonomous systems?

Key words: autonomous systems; human-machine interface

Consider an emergency response system that continuously updates accidents risk levels over time for a certain urban region based on both historical and real-time sensor information. Suppose that structural changes happen, e. g. temporarily blocking or adding a new route to the road network topology. In face of such changes, which modeling and simulation approaches would provide reasonable strategies for accurately updating risk levels?

Key words: smart cities; sensor networks

Considering the context of Pulp & Paper Next Industrial Revolution 4.0, what are the next practices, inside or outside the pulp and paper sector, regarding: Automation & Robotics.

Which practices in both themes could contribute to Brazil’s re-industrialization and industry’s competitiveness?

What further opportunities exists or are there for pulp and paper sector in order to exploit or increase industry productivity and reduce costs?

In the future, how can the entire industrial process be more efficient, more integrated and more agile, in order to get lower costs and higher impact on productivity?

What are the next practices for today’s pulp and paper industry with progressive integration of automation, robotics and information technology in its fourth industrial phase?

Considering the context of Pulp & Paper Next Industrial Revolution 4.0, what are the next practices, inside or outside the pulp and paper sector, regarding: Production & Planning Controls Tools.

Which recent trends and new tools are being successfully employed in production control and could be applied on Paper and Pulp?

What practices or tendencies will lead to more flexible and more efficient manufacturing processes and supply chains, so allowing an unprecedented level of mass production?

We have been facing a new challenge in the building automation area that consists of the person absence detection. It is relatively easy to detect presence but in order to detect the absence of a person it is necessary to cross historical data of different sensors. This information is important for building security, person safety and environmental concerns.

Neocontrol Automation Solutions was founded in 2004 to develop technology for the home automation market. Today, its products provide resources for home automation projects in buildings & hotels with different levels of complexity. Neocontrol works with technical expertise to developing safe and avant-garde automation systems.

Neocontrol's products connect lightning, curtain, air-conditions, cameras, audio & video devices, security sensors and access to a integrated software platform that provides a smart control and sustainable resources administration. This software generates a big amount of historical data about users behavior that is not used nowadays by the company.

We believe that this data can change the "state of the art" of home automation solutions providing many different types of functionalities and providing intelligent services for the client.

In building managing systems about 80% of the processes are triggered by the direct interfere of the user. We would like to know how we can transform most of this processes in seamless actions without the direct user interference. Seamless actions can bring a huge performance in building managing saving energy and increasing equipment life cycles.

Neocontrol Automation Solutions was founded in 2004 to develop technology for the home automation market. Today, its products provide resources for home automation projects in buildings & hotels with different levels of complexity. Neocontrol works with technical expertise to developing safe and avant-garde automation systems.

Neocontrol's products connect lightning, curtain, air-conditions, cameras, audio & video devices, security sensors and access to a integrated software platform that provides a smart control and sustainable resources administration. This software generates a big amount of historical data about users behavior that is not used nowadays by the company.

We believe that this data can change the "state of the art" of home automation solutions providing many different types of functionalities and providing intelligent services for the client.

In what ways could we expect that smart technologies will help to have a development capability that is competitive for a Smart Industry? For this we strive for a development capability that continue to improve in quality, that enable more advanced functionality and more unique customer adaptations to products while being more cost and resource efficient over time

High tech companies typically invest a substantial fraction of the turn-over in R&D. In the case of Saab, the R&D investment is roughly one quarter of the turnover. Saab prides itself for a strong innovation track record combined with affordability. Innovation is based on a knowledge and technology supply from partners and suppliers as well as in- house.
It can be seen that the application of smart technologies could contribute with challenges and opportunities such as complexity and increased capability requirements, but it could also be applied as means to increase e.g. robustness and resilience.
We can also see that this will influence future development projects, e.g. in terms of required level of functionality to master, but it may as well be that smart technologies could contribute to a more efficient development capability that may help to master more complex functionality, reduce lead times and increase possibilities for individual customer adaptations.
Finally, we could expect that there will be new approaches needed to prove safety, reliability as well as dealing with liabilities.

What research is ongoing and what can be expected in the future when it comes to achieve computer aided decision support in finding faults in welds such as cracks and defects?

Constructing ships and submarines requires a tremendous amount of welding.
To assure the right quality and to fulfil safety requirements much of the welds need to be checked using different non-destructive testing techniques such as x-ray, ultrasound, penetrants and magnetic particle testing. This quality testing is still a very time consuming manual labour very much based on experienced and well trained personnel.

What research and what can be expected in the future when it comes to using similar technologies for welding in confined spaces, i.e. the welder is outside the space and operates the welding robot using tactile devices and e.g. 3D vision?

Constructing ships and particularly submarines very often require welding in very confined spaces, such as inside tanks.
Welding in these secluded volumes is a challenge when it comes to working environment, safety and reachability. Some materials needs pre- and post-heating which results in a very hot environments. Additionally different gasses are released during the welding.
Today much R&D is put into e.g. remote surgery where a doctor can perform remote surgery by using robotic devices including tactile sensors.

Cancer remains one of the major unmet challenges in medicine. In approximately 100 years of cancer research there has been little or no change in the mortality rates. Modern technologies have enabled new tools such as organs on chip to aid cancer investigation, yet much remains to be done. Our company has life sciences as one of its main pillars, combining microfluidics with semiconductor technology. How can we best apply our potential to make a worldwide impact in cancer research?

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A complete automation system for excavator working in excavating ore and waste, and loading a bin that feeds a mobile crusher. The excavator automation should be able to allow the operator to dig the material, and once the operator activates the automatic process, the excavator position the bucket over the bin in the shortest time possible, avoiding collisions, and will unload all material into it. The process must avoid any spillage, either from bucket as from bin borders. After unloading, the excavator will reposition the bucket in the original position, returning the control to the operator. It is expected that this automation will increase operational efficiency, and will mitigate fatigue and ergonomic risks to the operator.

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Is it possible to reduce spare parts inventory in mining by taking advantage of 3D printing technology? For which parts could it be economically viable. A full survey of parts and its properties should be performed to be compared to properties that can be achieved using the technology, and finally a viability / trade-off study should be carried out.

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Evaluation of different strategies for optimization of fleet operations. The optimization of fleet operation for a large mining company is critical in order to reduce costs and improve efficiency. With an increased access to fleet operational data, e.g. from telemetry, a large number of decision variables can be considered for the different assets (equipment health, lifetime functions, average consumption, etc.). There is also considerable freedom in the choice of optimization criteria (consumption, time, productivity, etc.). What are the most appropriate strategies for optimization of fleet operation? Which variables should be considered and how the different criteria will affect operations? How to define a benchmark solution? How to compare performance of existing solutions?

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Nowadays there are lots of customized Smart Industry solutions in the market. Which criteria should be evaluated for a potential application in the manufacturing industry and which are the main tendencies for analytical tools?

Open source technologies or Market solutions, Haddop or Spark, R or Python?

Vallourec's main issue about Big Data is the data volume, not variety. How to identity that our problem can be approached by Smart Industry solutions?

90% of our source data are relational and the rest of 10% is time based and we have at least 20TB of data.

Focus on the Driver – not the Technology. Monitoring driver attention & assessing driver capabilities, Brain and workload studies as a base for new technologies. i.e. understanding human behaviour is essential for understanding the need and implications of new technologies within the area of autonomous drive (AD) and use of connectivity.

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In addition, we are interested in three main technology areas: sensor fusion, sensor data analysis, and localization. However, it has to be stressed that we are interested to develop all these methods for the verification of the sensors, i.e., to verify the active safety and autonomous driving (AD) sensors.

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