Kolektor Vision is a part of Qu4lity project
Kolektor participates in the largest European project Qu4lity, which lasts 39 months. The project is focused on autonomous quality and zero defect manufacturing (ZDM) in the Industry 4.0. 45 partners, such as ABB, Siemens, Philips and Continental, from 13 European countries participate in the project. Qu4lity will demonstrate, in a realistic, measurable and replicable way an open, certifiable and highly standardized, SME-friendly and transformative shared data-driven ZDM product and service model for Factory 4.0 through 14 pilot lines. Qu4lity will also demonstrate how European industry can build unique and highly tailored ZDM strategies and competitive advantages through an orchestrated open platform ecosystem, ZDM automized components and digital enablers across all phases of product and process lifecycle. The main goal of the project is to build an autonomous quality model to meet the Industry 4.0 ZDM challenges.
The Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) concept has been articulated more than forty years ago as an element of quality management and has been gradually adopted as a quality optimization discipline in the manufacturing chain. Manufacturers have been deploying various ZDM solutions targeting different aspects of quality control and production processes, such as factory automation, condition monitoring, supply chain optimization, and predictive maintenance. Despite different approaches, ZDM adoption is still not completely successful. Large enterprises have to deal with many complex ZDM processes at scale, while SMEs lack the knowledge, skills and equity capital to invest in sophisticated digital manufacturing solutions in general and holistic ZDM solutions in particular. With 14 lighthouse pilots the project will guide and help both smaller and medium-sized enterprises on their way of implementing and reaching the ZDM production.
Kolektor is a part of the pilot project which focuses on production lines with included injection molding products. Anomalies, which may occur anywhere during the injection process, cause a lower products quality. At the moment, such irregularities cannot be detected early enough to repair or optimize the manufacturing process errors in such time, so that numerous/significant scrap would not occur.
The pilot survey will be held on Kolektor's production lines, which include injection molding of plastic products. The Institute Jožef Stefan, Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, CEA-LIST and Visual Components are also a part of this pilot research. In addition to production lines, Kolektor will:
- provide appropriate digital platform, including KiS 4.0 and its own production information system (MES/MOM),
- collect relevant samples and provide manufacturing tools and materials,
- develop and embed intelligent IoT sensors,
- gather data and develop methods to understand the data – BigData,
- communicate with robots and generate high-level commands for robots.
Kolektor and partners will supervise the injection molding process, the mold and the line, end/finished products and parameters such as temperature, pressure and sound during the process. The obtained data will be compared with the quality of the products and through machine learning they will attempt to find links between certain parameters and good or bad products.
The objective of this pilot research is to develop a system, which will detect potential anomalies in the production process and repair them itself as far as possible, or else notify the operator of an error. In this way, the amount of bad products will be reduced by at least 20%, which will raise the efficiency and profitability of production lines involving the injection molding process of plastic parts.
Find out more about this project
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825030.