July 2019
LS_ENERGY FOR WOOD FLOURS 4.0
La.So.Le. Est, for several years, has undertaken a process of renewal of its production plants to improve performance. In particular, the company has fully embraced the industry 4.0 paradigm, making industrial automation increasingly integrate some new production technologies to improve working conditions, create new business models and increase productivity and production quality of the plants.
All departments are now in advanced automation driven. Over the years the "cells" constituting the production lines have been gradually designed and implemented or modernized.
According to the CIM model (Computer Integrated Manufacturing), the production cells represent a set of machines physically interconnected by a material transport and storage system, controlled in a coordinated manner to complete a well-defined production process. The modular pyramid architecture defines different levels such as Field, Machine, Cell, Factory, Company. It is impossible to report here all the details.
We recall that in November 2018 there was an important investment (the Capstone cogeneration plant fueled with methane gas), which drastically changed the way of access to energy and the acquisition of production data.
Interfacing, integrating, modeling, observing the industrial automatic systems composing the two main production lines, are part of a new project by La.So.Le. Est called "LS_Energy", which takes the form of extracting significant numerical values, which represent and explain the state of the overall production plant, in the current instant, and in historical moments (with variable frequency, currently 20 minutes).
Therefore a multisensory tool was built for solving real problems by providing the answers required in terms of appropriate information otherwise imperceptible.
The "LS_Energy" integrated software-sensor system is itself a technological tool that adds technology to the existing one in the company.
We can say that "LS_Energy" has artificial intelligence in its logic, just think of the ability to discriminate and choose if a part of the plant is in STOP or is in RUN, acquiring information (measurements) autonomously, carrying out the logical processes, and writing the results in database.
We have now entered the future and therefore it is really true that "what we achieve is what we dream of".