First umati and Digital Industries World hackathon drives forward IIoT solutions

The first ever hack­a­thon fea­tur­ing umati, the con­nectiv­ity ini­ti­at­ive of the mech­an­ic­al and plant engin­eer­ing industry, “Mind­Sphere”, the Siemens IoT-as-a-Ser­vice solu­tion, and the Digit­al Indus­tries World e.V., IIoT com­munity was held at the end of Septem­ber 2022 in Mindel­heim. 32 digit­al­iz­a­tion experts from 10 engin­eer­ing and star­tup com­pan­ies were hos­ted by Grob-Werke GmbH & Co. KG in Mindel­heim. Under the ban­ner of “IoT­ize the Industry”, they worked togeth­er to devel­op the free exchange of data between machine and soft­ware systems.

For Dr. Alex­an­der Broos, Head of Research and Tech­no­logy at the VDW (Ger­man Machine Tool Build­ers’ Asso­ci­ation), Frank­furt am Main, and umati pro­ject man­ager, the event was a com­plete suc­cess: “It was great to see so many cre­at­ive minds gathered in one place and work­ing togeth­er on real-world chal­lenges. If we are ser­i­ous about con­nect­ing machines in an intel­li­gent way, our top pri­or­ity is to bring the rel­ev­ant people togeth­er.” Ulf Könekamp, Chair­man of Digit­al Indus­tries World, agrees: “Only togeth­er are we strong – and can ini­ti­ate import­ant changes for the future. We are delighted that the hack­a­thon was able to help pro­duce solu­tions across dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies and departments.”

In a total of five teams, the par­ti­cipants were able to learn from each oth­er and com­pare notes. The main focus was on exchan­ging actu­al data (such as GPS or vibra­tion data from machines con­nec­ted to the umati demon­strat­or via OPC UA) between dif­fer­ent sys­tems, e.g. via Mind­Sphere. The aim was to gen­er­ate ini­tial added value from this data in order to optim­ize avail­ab­il­ity or capa­city util­iz­a­tion in pro­duc­tion, for example.

The res­ult was a wide vari­ety of dif­fer­ent solu­tions. One of the most import­ant real­iz­a­tions was that cross-com­pany col­lab­or­a­tion is to every­one’s advant­age. In addi­tion, par­ti­cipants repor­ted a very steep learn­ing curve over the two days, mean­ing that the time was used even more pro­duct­ively and effi­ciently than usu­al. One of the most remark­able achieve­ments was the fact that a num­ber of first pro­to­type applic­a­tions – includ­ing remote access to machine status lights, GPS track­ing and multi­s­ensor eval­u­ation of vibra­tions – were gen­er­ated prac­tic­ally out of nowhere. A fur­ther import­ant aspect was that the organ­izers were able to use the event to obtain use­ful feed­back on the tech­no­lo­gies used.

The gen­er­al feed­back to the organ­izers was extremely favor­able – both in terms of the sub­stant­ive pos­sib­il­it­ies and also the organ­iz­a­tion­al frame­work. “The hack­a­thon was an extremely reward­ing and well-planned event based on intens­ive and effect­ive team­work. We are glad that we could be part of it. We warmly recom­mend all oth­er com­pan­ies to take advant­age of this out­stand­ing oppor­tun­ity for dia­logue and net­work­ing,” emphas­izes par­ti­cipant Dr. Donatus Weber, Dir­ect­or of Digit­al Ser­vices at Kampf Schneid- und Wick­el­tech­nik GmbH und Co. KG in Wiehl. umati and Digit­al Indus­tries World are plan­ning to pro­mote this by organ­iz­ing a num­ber of hack­a­thons at dif­fer­ent loc­a­tions in the com­ing year – includ­ing at EMO Han­nov­er 2023 next September.

To down­load the press release click here:
umati.org/wp-content/uploads/pm_umati_Hackathon_2022-11–22_EN.pdf

More pub­lic­a­tions are avail­able in the down­load sec­tion!