Industry 4.0 solutions are considered to be digital drivers of success. However, companies in industries with spacious grounds or areas subject to explosion hazards are often not integrated into the modern flow of information and data owing to a lack of economic options, compatibility, or certifications. In an article (in German) in the current issue of the professional journal Telecom Handel, Marco Kuhn from ecom and online editor Jürgen Schreier describe the solution Lufthansa Industry Solutions can offer companies to solve this Problem.
Norderstedt, July 28, 2017 – “Enabling technical progress to be put into practice is the challenge,” states Dr. Holger Schlüter, Associate Director of IoT/Industry 4.0 at Lufthansa Industry Solutions. “After all, regardless of your industry, companies all share the same task: they have to design their entire value creation chain so as to reduce costs while at the same time increasing productivity and efficiency. Managing, tracking, and locating assets play an important part in this.” Lufthansa Industry Solutions puts for explosive areas its trust in Loc-Ex 01 - BLE Beacons from ecom, a company of the Pepperl+Fuchs Group.
This real-time localization system was developed specifically for pinpointing nearby objects. Attaching small Bluetooth beacons to assets turns them into intelligent, locatable objects that can provide information on temperature or fill level, for instance, and even respond to things like keystroke, brightness, shock, or change of position. Apart from spatial information, data on local process parameters can also be transmitted in real time.
Beacon technology offers decisive advantages to Lufthansa Industry Solutions: compared to other geolocation technologies, it enables a high degree of precision and accuracy in all three axes. Owing to its wide range of up to 300 meters in open spaces, the costs of monitoring large areas can be kept down and the desired locating accuracy varied by changing the number of installed beacons. Furthermore, relationships to neighboring objects and alarms can be defined if, for instance, hazardous goods should collide or be stored side by side. What is more, they are not sensitive to fluctuations in signal strength, which is another big advantage compared to conventional Bluetooth-based localization technologies. A further advantage is their low level of battery power consumption.
Lufthansa Industry Solutions is a service provider for IT consulting and system integration. This Lufthansa subsidiary helps its clients with the digital transformation of their companies. Its customer base includes companies both within and outside the Lufthansa Group, as well as more than 200 companies in various lines of business. The company is based in Norderstedt and employs more than 1,300 members of staff at several branch offices in Germany, Switzerland and the USA.