Projects in Brazil

The BEMO-COFRA project aims to develop an innovative distributed framework which allows networked monitoring and control of large-scale complex systems by integrating heterogeneous smart objects, legacy devices and sub-systems, possibly cooperating to support holistic management and achieve overall systems’ efficiency with respect to energy and raw materials. The main weaknesses of present manufacturing systems, which highly affect overall efficiency and reduce competitiveness includes:

1. Process integration: limited integration among the processes involved in the engineering and management of the plants.
2. Flexibility: difficulties to provide an adequate flexibility of the production plant therefore reducing the capacity of complying with continuously varying product mixes and volumes.
3. Scalability and re-configurability: production systems are not designed to be easily reconfigurable.
4. Manufacturing efficiency: the monitoring of productivity is affected by low diagnostics capacity; there are usually no efficient instruments to detect engineering errors and to prevent installation problems, as well as efficient data logging to enable preventive maintenance.

The BEMO-COFRA project will address both technological aspects and user needs to promote a wider adoption of large-scale networked monitoring and control solutions. In the project vision, this will be attained by:

1. Defining novel mechanisms to enforce reliability of Wireless Sensor And Actuator Networks (WSANs) operating in harsh environments and serving heterogeneous application constraints by means of context awareness, self-configuration and self-adaption capabilities
2. Adopting distributed and decentralized approaches to provide WSANs with scalable monitoring, control and self-diagnosis capabilities.
3. Introducing a Service Oriented Architecture (SoA) and a middleware that, by exposing smart objects capabilities as web services, makes it possible for the innovative WSAN developed within the project to cooperate with legacy devices/systems thanks to semantic interoperability.

Deployment

The BEMO-COFRA infrastructure represents a suitable solution for the management of large-scale complex systems in different application domains e.g. transportation, power and manufacturing. Despite some peculiarities, all such application domains are characterized by a highly networked environment and by an increasing need for integration of different heterogeneous technologies. However, the manufacturing environment poses further unique challenges in terms of harsh radio propagation conditions, dependable operations, real-time or quasi real-time communication constraints and also mobility (e.g. smart objects installed on board moving parts of a production line) that make it particularly suitable for BEMO-COFRA validation purposes.

BEMO-COFRA strives for the realization of a large-scale distributed monitoring and control framework that eases the supervision and the optimization of physical processes. The potential impact of the developed solution will be made visible by demonstrating the capabilities of a BEMO-COFRA-enabled production monitoring and control system deployed in a test bed manufacturing plant provided by COMAU Brazil.

Fraunhofer FIT's participation in BEMO-COFRA

Fraunhofer FIT will ensure the success of the project by applying an overall project management based on the well-known Project Management Institute (PMI) standards. Apart from project coordination, FIT is involved in the development of sensor fusion and context-awareness technologies to enable an intelligent monitoring and control system in the manufacturing domain. FIT together with In-JeT and ISMB are responsible for transferring the results obtained from the Hydra and ebbits projects, e.g. establishing Linksmart middleware in the project, applying middleware design and adaptive-system know-how.