Lower costs for IT-Integration with SMARTUNIFIER

ByFrank Frauenhoffer
smartunifier at the heart of connectivity

The dilemma of today’s industries – How to lower costs?

In a world of rising digital connectivity and Industry 4.0, production industries are in a dilemma. How can they manage to integrate a heterogeneous IT landscape and execute their digital transformation without embarking on a never-ending journey?

What are the challenges of the industry?

Do you want to improve your manufacturing efficiency and quality and lower costs but lack visibility of equipment level and interrelated systems’ data? Are equipment failures causing costly down-time? Is your digital transformation project stuck due to high complexity of interfaces and equipment?

Industrial processes are implemented with multiple types and brands of equipment, often with disparate, legacy interfaces that are difficult to maintain. Collecting data can be labour-intensive and possibly delayed and unreliable.

Monitoring equipment condition, measuring performance, and determining the impact on manufacturing processes requires access to multiple data sources with varying protocols. Informed, predictive, and prescriptive processing is possible with the right level of access.

SMARTUNIFIER solves the integration problem

For industrial organizations and solution providers that want to optimize access to varied equipment data to enable process improvement, Amorph’s SMARTUNIFIER provides an easy-to-use, robust, scalable, and cost-effective IIOT integration platform that will immediately pay-off and lower costs for your integration projects.  

SMARTUNIFIER: the connectivity solution for Industry 4.0

SMARTUNIFIER can combine multiple data channels for a holistic view of an entire process or various processes. User-definable data mapping simplifies interface creation, and numerous pre-packaged, reusable protocol converters (adapters) are available to collect equipment status and condition data. High-volume and high-speed, real-time protocol conversion enables high-speed production monitoring.

The diagram below illustrates the SMARTUNIFIER solution.

A typical architecture how smartunifier connects equipment to upper level systems
Architecture diagram

Within SMARTUNIFIER, an Information Model describes the communication-related data available from a device or IT system. One device, or one IT system, therefore, is represented by one Information Model. Information Models can consist of variables, events, and commands and are reusable across different devices and IT systems.

The Mapping represents the SMARTUNIFIER component that defines when and how to exchange and transform data between two or multiple Information Models. It acts as a translator between the different Information Models. One Mapping consists of one or multiple rules. A rule contains a trigger that defines when the exchange/transformation should occur and a list of actions that describe how to do it. Information Models and Mappings add semantics or meaning to the data that is being exchanged, providing enterprise context.

A Channel refers to a transmission medium and conveys information from one or several senders (or transmitters). The pathways for communicating data from one location to another are called Communication Channels, which transmit data according to communication protocols. Each Information Model can have one Channel or many, and each model can choose which Channels it subscribes to. The information is transmitted through the Communication Channels in both directions: from the external system to the SMARTUNIFIER application and vice versa.

The following diagram illustrates the basic functionality.

This is an example how information is staged and mapped by smartunifier from shop floor to Norhtbound systems
Communication channel example

A SMARTUNIFIER Instance is a dynamically created agent application deployed on any suitable IT resource (e.g., Equipment, PC, Server, Cloud) that provides the configured connectivity functionality. An Instance uses one or multiple Mappings and selected Communication Channels from a defined device type. Multiple Instances can be readily deployed, enabling rapid scaling within a location or across multiple sites. Deployed instances have low hardware capacity requirements and can be operated on numerous standard hardware platforms.

In addition to supporting south-bound and north-bound interfaces, east- and west-bound interfaces can be deployed to create Swarm Topologies.

SMARTUNIFIER‘s Deployment Architecture

SMARTUNIFIER is based on a fully decentralized system architecture (Swarm) using Container Technologies for virtually unlimited scalability.

Installation of smartunifier possible on the edge, on-premise or in the cloud as swarm
Swarm deployment

All the decentralized Instances are centrally managed by the SMARTUNIFIER manager, including real-time monitoring and logging of deployed Communication Instances.

Deployments can be on-premise (e.g. Industrial PCs, Edge Devices), in data centres, in the cloud, and hybrid deployments are also supported.

SMARTUNIFIER provides the integration platform that enables Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to quickly and easily connect to equipment and other systems. Thereby enabled to measure, monitor, and control industrial processes, enterprise-level applications can provide the functionality to improve efficiency and quality and lower costs.   

So how can we lower costs for you? – The SMARTUNIFIER Advantages

The ease of integrating with SMARTUNIFIER to enable your connectivity will deliver an immediate return on investment. This will lower costs for your entire integration lifecycle. Customers have been able to reduce their costs for integrating new equipment by up to 90% using SMARTUNIFIER. Below is a summary of the advantages that make this possible:

  • Can be deployed on multiple platforms, on-premise, on the edge, in data centers, in the cloud.
  • Virtually unlimited scalability through fully decentralized architecture (Swarm) that can be centrally managed.
  • Rapid real-time protocol conversion enables timely and reliable access to high-speed production data.
  • Reusable and versioned interface models for similar equipment- or device types.
  • Unlimited amount of communication connections, protocols, and information models (multi-channel capability).
  • Configurable mapping means interface coding is minimized.
  • Development and deployment of interfaces can be completed in hours or days instead of weeks and months.

Still not convinced? Our experienced team will explain to you how to realize what we promise. Just contact us via info@amorph.pro or by using the form on our website for a project-request.