Future factories to benefit from smart monitoring
A multinational company focusing on energy smart grids will take part in a €7m project aimed at creating new ways to deploy optimised and reactive planning systems using smart sensors in factories.
Smarter Grid Solutions, based in Glasgow, UK, will receive €675,000 as part of the ‘Operational planning tool interfacing manufacturing integrated simulations with empirical data’, or OPTIMISED, project. The envisaged planning systems will use factory modelling and simulation based on captured empirical data.
As part of the project, Smarter Grid Solutions will develop an Active Network Management (ANM) system for industrial demand-side management. The firm’s ANM technology will be used for energy monitoring and control in order to provide fast-acting, demand side response and will be fully integrated with other factory management systems to provide complete information about the factory’s operational status with specific emphasis on energy management and demand response.
Graham Ault, development director at Smarter Grid Solutions, said: “Our ANM technology will enable fast acting demand response – a crucial energy management component for the OPTIMISED factories of the future.”
The venture is almost fully funded by the European Commission through Horizon 2020 under the Factories of the Future scheme. It is the second time Smarter Grid Solutions has secured a Horizon 2020 grant this year; the firm also has offices in London and New York.
The research and innovation action is co-ordinated by international engineering company Laing O’Rourke, an international engineering enterprise based in Dartford. The project consortium comprises ten partners from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain, with the venture running from the start of next month until 2018.
