Every two years Vitrum confirms itself as the ideal stage in which to show Italy, Europe and the entire global glass industry its innovations. For us to Mappi it is an opportunity to continue our continuous pursuit of excellence, both in the design and construction of the hardening furnace and in the creation of increasingly advanced software solutions. This year the new frontier that Mappi intends to explore is that of Edge Computing. Let's try to clarify what we're talking about, without getting too technical, but focusing, as we always do at Mappi, on the daily needs of those who work in the glass industry.
In recent years, electronics has entered the glass tempering process more and more powerfully, guaranteeing, in its more advanced applications, such as those that characterize Mappi ovens, precise control of operating temperatures, management of tempering management times and parameters.
This second aspect is equally important, because it allows the processes for loading and managing the plates to be tempered to be defined simply and quickly. Again, electronics allow real-time generation of reports that accurately describe the results of the tempering process, and which create a direct link between the "machine" and the entire "organization" that manages the glass factory.
All this makes it possible to achieve levels of Quality, Productivity and Energy savings that were unthinkable until a few years ago.
We are therefore with the hardening furnace which is at the center of industry 4.0, perfectly integrated into the production structure.
A real "capacity for dialogue" is created. And this "dialogue" is the crucial point of our discourse, the source of unknowns and problems, because every dialogue can be listened to, and spied on. And here the crucial element of our discussion comes into play: the security and ownership of data and processing. In recent years, precisely because there has been an enormous increase in data flows, in their sharing, very often in structures and databases external to the company, such as clouds, there has been an equally enormous increase in the theft of sensitive data, digital identities, confidential information, especially in the industrial sector.
We are well aware that developing a patent costs years of work and huge investments, which is why there are many who try to save time and money by simply stealing it through the internet and digital networks in general.
The antidote to this is Edge Computing: the structures that process and manage the data are closer to the company, this allows you to act at higher speeds and volumes, in real time, and thus allowing you to have your data in-house with greater security.
This results in faster and safer processing. Furthermore, integrating this processing capacity with the new opportunities offered by artificial intelligence, with its ability to carry out scenario simulations, opens up the possibility of carrying out predictive checks on the machine, optimizing assistance and reliability, and continuing to use, where necessary, the data in the Cloud in order to be able to exchange them with other systems or ERPs.
In this sector Mappi continues and profitably consolidates its collaboration with Siemens. TO Vitrum Mappi will present some applications on a real machine and, in partnership with Siemens, will offer a MasterGlass on the possibilities of Edge computing in advanced industrial applications. Once again a leap into the future based on the desire to make the entire glassware system and the daily life of those who work there better and more efficient.
