Top Data Science won the Digital Fiber Ecosystem Innovation Challenge
The Digital Fiber Ecosystem, jointly organized by Siemens and Spinverse, has finalized its Bio-Based Industry IoT Innovation Challenge. Top Data Science won the competition with an AI solution for product quality prediction and process optimization. The winner receives an opportunity to collaborate with Siemens in IoT industrial solution development.
"All three finalists, Top Data Science, Altum and FiberLaboratory of XAMK, offered different valuable perspectives to the challenge. We will be happy to have them in our ecosystem", says Lars Maura, Head of Business Development at Siemens.
"Competition between the finalists was tough. In the selection criteria, the jury emphasized digital twin and IoT aspects, customer applicability, effects on business, and suitability to the forest industry vertical and the Siemens SIPAPER product family", explains jury member Timo Ropponen from Spinverse.
In forest industry, many plants are facing challenges to control product quality efficiently. The quality of the end products relies on how the production lines are operated. The challenge is how to help operators run the production lines in an optimal setup to produce the best quality products. By solving the problem, plants can minimize financial losses and increase customer satisfaction. Plants become more environmentally friendly by reducing the usage of unnecessary chemicals and materials.
In the Innovation Challenge, Top Data Science proposed an Artificial Intelligence solution that reads the data from sensors in the production lines to predict the product quality in advance, to simulate multiple outcomes and to optimize the production process. The system operators can easily control the production processes via smart devices and have more time to focus on their professional work. The solution can run on an open IoT platform such as MindSphere as a microservice, which uses MindSphere’s components for data storage, computing resource, data connectivity, use authentication and authorization and APIs. The proposed solution has been validated and deployed in a real production line in a forest industry mill.
Spinverse provided coaching and advice to the participants and acted as the link between them and Siemens to ensure efficient and agile collaboration during the process. Spinverse has a strong track record in arranging Innovation Challenges for large corporations, such as SSAB and Sandvik, Valmet, Fingrid, Gasum, Fortum, and Borealis, which have led to joint development and piloting of the winning solutions in practical applications.
About Digital Fiber ecosystem
Digital Fiber Initiative (DFI) is an industry-driven innovation ecosystem for forest industry digitalization with the aim to achieve the next level of industrial productivity. In DFI, Siemens technology solutions include COMOS process lifecycle management software and the open cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform MindSphere. With COMOS, integrated plant asset management projects over the entire industrial lifecycle can be carried out. Design engineers, plant operating personnel, company management and solution partners are provided with a continuous flow of data that meets their specific needs across all project phases. MindSphere connects machines and physical infrastructure to the digital world and provides powerful industrial apps and digital services that can unleash productivity gains and efficiency across the entire business.