- Status reports from the speedboat projects: Trumpf optimises customer processes with AI
- BMWi-funded AI project Service-Meister on schedule
The Service-Meister Consortium announces it will unveil its 2020-developed platform architecture at the end of the year. This means that the project to develop a service ecosystem based on artificial intelligence (AI) is on schedule. Service-Meister is developing innovations using AI to improve the service processes of small and medium-sized enterprises from 2022. Using smart chatbots, augmented reality or AI apps, service technicians can access all the information they need for the respective service case from anywhere. These are stored and analysed in a shared data room.
“With Service-Meister, we want to leverage the enormous economic potential that artificial intelligence has for small and medium-sized enterprises,” says Andreas Weiss, Head of the Digital Business Models division at eco – Association of the Internet Industry. “This includes addressing the skills shortage in the SME sector.” If the economy as a whole and SMEs were to use AI across the board, according to the AI study by the eco Association, growth in the gross domestic product of more than 13 per cent by 2025 (compared to 2019) could be realised, which corresponds to a total potential of around 488 billion Euro.
AI enables predictive maintenance
Service-Meister is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), which recently announced plans to increase AI funding from three to five billion Euro by 2025. This is in line with the update of the German federal government’s AI strategy approved by the Cabinet. “With powerful initiatives and more money for artificial intelligence today, we will secure the innovative strength and competitiveness of tomorrow. The key is to improve the transfer of research results into application and to trigger the widespread use of AI throughout the SME sector,” said the German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Peter Altmaier.
The Service-Meister speedboat projects are examples of the successful transfer of research results into application. In each of these individual use cases, an industry partner and an implementation partner cooperate. Trumpf and USU Software, for example, are working together to automatically diagnose the status of systems, reduce maintenance costs and efficiently plan service calls. This is to be achieved with a combination of sensor technology, diagnostic procedures, and AI know-how. “The goal is to use artificial intelligence to enable our machines to predictively maintain themselves,” says Maximilian Veith of Trumpf. This will be possible, for example, with the help of intelligent analysis of various diagnostic data, which in the future will also include noise changes, for example. Necessary data is transferred to a cloud platform and evaluated there in a differentiated manner. Based on this information, maintenance tickets can be (partially) automated in the future, and feedback on the success of measures can be used in a continuous learning and improvement process. This continuously increases system availability and reduces maintenance costs.
The Service-Meister consortium works on solutions
In the Service-Meister research project, companies such as KEB, Atlas Copco, WĂĽrth, Krohne, and Trumpf are working in tandem with implementation partners USU, Inovex, Open Grid Europe, and Grandcentrix. The tandems are currently developing individual use cases in six so-called speedboat projects, in which the knowledge and training level of the respective employees is also an important topic.
