Enlarge: CESMII

Germany and the United States are among the top five manufacturing countries in the world. The two countries’ manufacturers share an interconnected network of facilities and suppliers, including many small and medium-sized enterprises. Plattform Industrie 4.0 (Germany) and CESMII (US) are announcing their partnership to address similar challenges and needs related to Industrie 4.0 / Smart Manufacturing. For both manufacturing economies to compete, they need international collaboration to achieve major tasks like semantic interoperability, create data sharing platforms, develop workforce skills, and foster sustainable production.
Platform Industrie 4.0 promotes the development of Industrie 4.0 in Germany by developing pre-competitive concepts, recommendations and use cases for practical application. CESMII promotes Smart Manufacturing in the US by supporting precompetitive research and development, providing tools and test bed for new technology as public-private partnerships, and creating content for educating a next generation of smart manufacturers.
“Production is globally connected, and manufacturers are in digital transformation worldwide. Whereas digitalization provides great potentials like higher resilience, flexibility, and efficiency, we need to shape digital ecosystems globally and learn together to unfold these potentials. We highly appreciate the ongoing working relationship with CESMII and are happy to have CESMII on stage of the Hannover Messe to jointly discuss the digitalization of industry”, says Thomas Hahn, member of the Steering Committee of Plattform Industrie 4.0.

Plattform Industrie 4.0 and CESMII at the Hannover Messe 2021

Plattform Industrie 4.0 is particularly honored that CESMII accepted the invitation to their panel ​Shaping digital ecosystems globally at the Hannover Messe on Wednesday April 14th, which will be live streamed. The Hannover Messe 2021 provides an excellent opportunity to present first results of the cooperation. At Plattform Industrie 4.0’s ​digital booth, a video demonstrator on interoperability will be shown (via LNI 4.0) and a joint position paper discussing upskilling and ecological sustainability will be published.

Collaboration in two core areas: technology standardization and workforce skills

Technology standardization is critical to ensure that pre-competitive technology in smart manufacturing is interoperable across different IT/OT systems. Developing workforce competencies and skills is essential to continue the path of innovation and to drive adoption. These are highly complementary efforts that will help the US and Germany to ensure these systems work well based on common standards that are mutually beneficial.
John Dyck, CEO of CESMII, appreciates the joint progress since June 2020: “Both sides have invested significant time to understand each other’s approaches and national context. We have now reached a point where we can start defining concrete activities. It is important to us that our efforts also respond to the needs of small and medium-sized companies, especially to recover from Covid-19 and to create new jobs in the future. Plattform Industrie 4.0 and CESMII also see great potential in the digital transformation of manufacturing to enhance ecological sustainability as we point out in our joint position paper.”

Video demonstrator at Hannover Messe 2021 shows: Smart Manufacturing Profiles and Industrie 4.0 Asset Administration Shell have a high level of interoperability

One major achievement was to understand the technology and terminology used by the two initiatives’ technical solutions to ensure interoperability of assets across countries and domains. The Smart Manufacturing Profiles (SM Profiles by CESMII) and the Asset Ad-ministration Shell (AAS by Plattform Industrie 4.0) enable the exchange of information between partners in value-added networks. The information exchange will be realized on a standardized basis along an asset’s entire life cycle. “The SM Profiles and AAS show high levels of synergies. Both implementations will be harmonized. Our video demonstrator on the Asset Administration Shell gives a first insight”, explains Dr. Dominik Rohrmus, CTO of Labs Network Industrie 4.0, on behalf of Plattform Industrie 4.0. Realizing this ambition, Plattform Industrie 4.0 and CESMII agreed to implement the technologies in their existing testbeds.