DTAI-FET MAKES MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS SMARTER

ONDERZOEKER IN DE KIJKER

For manufacturing companies striving for zero-defect production and zero machine downtime, there is good news. On 1 January, a new core lab DTAI-FET (Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Engineering Technology) started within Flanders Make. Thirty researchers are working on tools for high-performance production environments. Among them are professors Peter Karsmakers, Joost Vennekens, Mathias Verbeke and Anastasia Dimou and research manager Wannes Meert.

The new core lab is part of the Decision & Control competence cluster within Flanders Make, the strategic research centre of the manufacturing industry in Flanders. “Flanders Make supports small, medium and large manufacturing companies with innovative research on machinery, assembly and products”, Prof. Karsmakers explains. “Flanders make’s strategic choice is to combine cyber-physical assets and digital twins in the most optimal way, in order to obtain actionable insights via the usage of domain knowledge (model-based) and data driven (artificial intelligence) approaches, yielding value in product and production, people and business. Flanders Make counts more than 750 researchers who create added value for the manufacturing industry.”

“For its part, the Decision & Control competence cluster contributes more specifically to the development of technology for intelligent monitoring and control systems and the support of the decisionmaking process,” continues Prof. Dimou. “Intelligent operations and maintenance using AI, robust adaptive control, and visual context perception are key research topics of this cluster.”

Prof. Joost Vennekens, prof. Anastasia Dimou, prof. Peter Karsmakers, prof. Mathias Verbeke

© Filip Van Loock

Decision support

With the new core lab, Flanders Make aims to strengthen the Decision & Control competence cluster with AI expertise. “The Declarative Languages & Artificial Intelligence (DTAI) research group has indeed already built up quite a lot of experience in implementing AI in industrial applications,” confirms Wannes Meert. “An important part of our research deals specifically with machine learning and knowledge representation and reasoning problems. The core lab gives us the opportunity to even better bridge the gap between basic research and applied industrial practice.”

One of the projects in the pipeline deals with decision support. Prof. Vennekens gives the example of attaching rubber strips to car doors. “How exactly that should be done is usually scattered in different manuals or with different people. When all this knowledge is brought together, also about the times something went wrong, the operators can control the machines much more precisely and the production time can be reduced significantly.”

Smart maintenance

Another example is smart maintenance. “This is where sensors come in handy,” Prof. Verbeke explains. “They collect masses of data that can be interpreted and applied in self-learning monitoring and knowledge tools. Based on this analysis, warnings can be triggered to indicate when a machine needs maintenance or parts need to be replaced so that production does not have to be interrupted unnecessarily or prematurely. AI plays an indispensable role here”.

But there is more. “In modern production environments, decisions are becoming increasingly complex because not only a variable production process has to be taken into account, but also the changing production environment itself. You can compare it to self-driving cars operating in complex and dynamically varying conditions. They must be able to adjust their trajectory at any time.”

“We are working on AI techniques that automatically adapt to their environment, so that they can generate reliable analysis results. Such algorithms can configure themselves and engage in self-diagnosis in case of oversights or errors,” Prof. Verbeke said.

Competitive position

In addition to the DTAI core lab, Flanders Make established two other labs: Value, Cost & Circularity in Manufacturing (UAntwerp, UHasselt and KU Leuven) and Cost & Value Analysis & Optimisation (UGhent). These labs have been added to the Design & Optimisation competence cluster. They focus on design methods, sustainability, business process modelling and data analysis in the production phase.

“With the other core labs, we share the same mission,” Prof. Karsmakers concludes. “That is to contribute to technological innovation in the factories of the future and to expose the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry in Flanders.”

www.flandersmake.be

wms.cs.kuleuven.be/dtai

Yves Persoons