EBI: Engineering Business Intelligence
Industry 4.0 digitization of all aspects of process- and manufacturing industry, offers great potential to considerably increase economic and societal performance of regional business. This however requires an integral approach: new digital algorithms need to be reinforced by management, design and operational knowledge of the process. Performance needs to be made measurable and exchangeable on economically relevant dimensions like Cost and Demand, but also on societal aspects like Safety and Environment—such dimensions are furthermore far from independent. Thirdly, the disruptive nature of such algorithms requires technological acceptance and willingness to strongly alter procedures and collaborative relationships between Boardroom and Workfloor upon implementation of Industry 4.0. The specific combination between societal, economic and technological innovation provides an excellent opportunity to combine academic innovation with regional development across the entire spectrum of process and manufacturing industry.
A novel generation of Industry 4.0 algorithms that is driven by both large amounts of Process Data with Process, Chemical and Business knowledge offers a key opportunity for considerable evidence-based value creation in Dutch Process Industry. This requires both technical and social innovation, which makes it specifically suited for programmatic collaboration between knowledge institutes and industrial partners.
EBI will:
- Enable Process Operators to extend their control operations from mitigating faults as deviations of specific process measurements, to a more comprehensive view on performance that includes economic and societal dimensions.
- Enable Process Managers to observe comprehensive process performance in real-time, rather than retrospectively after integrating a lot of data for periodic reporting.
- Enable Process Technologists to better understand their process, as the algorithms make explicit use of process design information.
- Enable Process Analytical Technologists to extend the value of their technology to their customer, by turning diagnostics into performance measurement.
