Flanders Make supports Industry 4.0 with IoT platform

With establishments throughout Flanders and a team of more than 700 personnel, Flanders MakeOpens a new window fosters open innovation via high-quality research. Businesses can use this service to test and validate their products and production environment.

The research carried out by Flanders Make contributes to vehicle development, machine building, drone applications and other facets of Industry 4.0 among other things. “We are the biggest research center for Industry 4.0 in Belgium”, says CEO Dirk Torfs. “Our work here focuses on the various technological aspects of digital transformation: connectivity, data and analysis.”

Shared IoT platform

The idea emerged within Flanders Make to design a common IoT platform where researchers and businesses could collaborate around data. “Within the context of Industry 4.0, you can’t carry out a digital transformation without a decent IoT platform”, said Torfs. He makes a comparison with the internet. “Now we can’t survive without it. And an IoT environment like this, in the cloud, will be another thing that businesses can’t do without.”

In order to set up the IoT environment, Flanders Make used the expertise of Proximus and Codit. “Their proposal offered just/(or: proposal afforded) the right balance of a strong, scalable technology, customized support and a fair price. The platform enables a business to start with IoT without a huge initial layout. And we can rely on the expertise at Proximus to maintain the platform. The aim is to help businesses increase their efforts to improve/(or: businesses improve) their production processes. Because nowadays, a disproportionate amount of attention is focused on the product.”

Flanders Make lowers the threshold for businesses to strengthen their production processes using IoT applications.

Dirk Torfs, CEO Flanders Make

Low threshold

“A lot of our research concerns machine building”, Torfs continued. “Thanks to the data that we capture from these machines and then analyze on the IoT platform, we can improve the design of the machines, schedule maintenance more efficiently and give users more relevant advice about optimizing the machines.” This is how understanding data ensures continuous improvement. “It used to be difficult for businesses to gain access to that sort of data research. The IoT platform has removed that barrier.”

Digital Twins

Businesses can use the platform for developing digital twins: digital twin versions of machines, for example. Sensors in the machine then capture the data from the real world, while computational modelling shows how the sensors relate to one another. Next, the data is analyzed on the IoT platform and adjustments to the machine are proposed.

Safe in the cloud

The IoT platform that Proximus designed for Flanders Make is located in the cloud. “There are currently seven locations for our research environments connected with the platform”, said Torfs. “This project not only shows what is possible with IoT, but also represents a kind of case study for using the cloud. Thanks to the expertise at Proximus we have a safe environment where we can store huge volumes of data and where we can find the right tools to process that data.”