Increased Productivity andSustainability with DigitalProduction Optimization from NRW
The OptiProd.NRW Project
The process industry (chemistry, oil & gas, biotech, pharma, ...) is one of the most important industry branches in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Its competitiveness, productivity, and resource efficiency largely depend on the quality of the production scheduling. Today, production scheduling is often done manually, which is tedious, expensive, and inefficient.
In OptiProd.NRW, ICT experts from INOSIM Software GmbH
and scientists from the Process Dynamics and Operations Group (DYN) at TU Dortmund University, together with Bayer AG, one of the largest companies in the process industry in NRW, are developing a new software system that employs state-of-the-art methods of mathematical optimization to automatically calculate optimal production schedules.
Detailed "digital twins" of the production plant ensure that these schedules can be used directly in production without manual adjustments, which saves a lot of time and cost.
Optimal production schedules will reduce the environmental impact
as well as the energy and resource consumption of the process industry and will increase the performance of production plants. The process industry, which is one of the largest consumers of energy and raw materials in NRW, can thus produce more sustainably and achieve savings in the order of millions of Euros. Companies from NRW and beyond will thus strengthen their competitiveness also in an international environment and make the brand "Made in NRW" world-leading in digital production optimization.
The project will run for 3 years
(from January 2020 to December 2022), and the project is funded with a total amount of around € 690,000, with € 420,000 provided by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
and € 270,000 by the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The project partners are supported and advised by the Evonik Technology & lnfrastructure GmbH, another big player in the process industry in North Rhine-Westphalia, by the Innovations-Kontaktstelle (IKS) Hamburg, and by the ARIC Artificial Intelligence Center Hamburg.
