At this point in time, general production has yet to be designed so that it can ensure the requested flexibility in volume and format in a way that is economical and sustainable. Of course, there are already some personalized foods (e.g. from Coca-Cola, Kinderschokolade etc.) on the market. However, primarily in the beverage industry, the production and process control structures that companies have been using are rapidly exhausting their potential.
RoboFill 4.0 – Completely new, flexible concept for filling and beverage technology
Wide-ranging possibilities are emerging as part of Industrie 4.0 for producing individualized mass products in the future that are both highly customizable while remaining profitable. This problem brought together professors of brewing and beverage technology as well as those of food packaging technology at the Technical University of Munich with Fraunhofer IGCV and the industry partners Krones, Beckhoff, ProLeiT, Siemens, Dekron, Yaskawa Europe, the State Brewery Weihenstephan and infoteam Software. All parties worked alongside each other to come up with an innovative automation concept. RoboFill 4.0, as the project has been dubbed, is a concept for filling and beverage technology that is completely innovative, versatile and makes it easy to add more production modules. The purpose of this concept is the industrial supply of customized beverage bottles or packages. The focus is on having lot sizes in small batches down to even single units. According to project specifications, all plant components were to be configured as cyber-physical system components. This is a core principle of Industrie 4.0. The idea is that the components use network and cloud technologies to communicate continuously with each other and with higher-level systems. This makes it possible to achieve autonomous production control, while also laying the foundation for using numerous optimization processes in production technology (e.g. predictive maintenance).