HMI 2024: Bringing Manufacturing to a Digital, Edge AI World
Manufacturers looking to achieve Industry 4.0 must prioritize the digitization, AI integration, and the sustainability of their operations and infrastructure. These three trends were evident at Hannover Messe (HMI) 2024 , which took place April 22 to April 26 in Germany. HMI is known for bringing together thought leaders, exhibitors, and attendees from all over the world to exchange ideas about the latest industrial technologies.
At the event, Intel® Partner Alliance members demoed their new industrial transformation solutions, powered by Intel, that advance manufacturing to the next level.
“The key themes we are seeing: We’ve got sustainability going all over the place, we have software-defined manufacturing, AI is everywhere—it’s predominantly everywhere—and you see all kinds of robotics demos. Lots of really great things are going on,” says Jonathan Luse, General Manager of Industrial Solutions Management at Intel.
Empowering Industrial Innovation with Edge AI
At HMI 2024, technology solution provider Dell introduced the latest Dell NativeEdge Blueprints for Intel Edge AI Services, leveraging the Intel® OpenVINO™ Developer Toolbox (Video 1). The latest release is designed to increase flexibility and options when deploying and managing AI and machine learning applications at the edge.
“By integrating OpenVINO Developer Toolbox into NativeEdge Blueprints, we are empowering businesses to unlock the full potential of AI at the edge, optimizing operations and paving the way for new, intelligent applications,” says Muneyb Minhazuddin, Vice President and General Manager for NEX Compute and Edge AI Software at Intel.
Dell NativeEdge Blueprints also runs on manufacturers’ legacy brownfield embedded systems, providing greater opportunities for innovation.
The use of generative AI was also on display at the event, with Siemens, an industrial manufacturing solution provider, debuting its Industrial Copilot. The generative AI-powered assistant can generate complex automation code so engineers can reduce development time and decrease complexity.
Driving Toward Sustainable Manufacturing
Siemens showcased other products at the event with a focus on sustainability. The company proudly talked about Siemens EcoTech, an environmental product performance label designed to provide more transparency about the environmental impact of products. EcoTech assesses product lifecycle performance based on an Environmental Product Declaration to see how a product compares in areas such as materials, design, use, and end of lifecycle (Video 2).
Elsewhere on the show floor, global edge-to-cloud company HPE showcased how it uses Intel technology to provide an AI-enabled platform that brings together IoT, manufacturing, and enterprise data to provide more transparency, predictability, and control for various partners.
To highlight the event’s theme of “Energizing a Sustainability Industry”, the company partnered with Iceotope, a provider of liquid cooling solutions, to display a liquid-cooled edge server. Powered by its ProLiant DL380 servers and Iceotope’s Precision Liquid Cooling, the solution is built to provide energy-efficient, zero-touch computing in hard industrial environments and extreme temperatures (Video 3).
In addition, HPE demoed how manufacturers can stay on top of their industrial operations with better insights and predictability through an AI-powered digital twin with its OEM partner Bosch. Together the two companies demonstrated how manufacturers could create virtual simulations to view operations and test changes before going to production.
Other partners at the event included NexAIoT and NexCOBOT, subsidiaries of global IoT solutions provider NEXCOM International, which focused on next-generation functional safety robotics solutions; NexCOBOT also received the TÜV Rheinland Functional Safety certificate at the event for an x86 safety control platform it co-developed with Intel; Beckhoff, an automation technology provider, which displayed how its TwinCAT Core Boost is providing greater computing performance in real time with Intel® Core™ processors; and digital automation company Schneider Electric, which had a software-defined manufacturing solution on display, designed to help manufacturers improve their efficiency and resiliency.
Discover how Intel and its ecosystem partners help manufacturers reach industry 4.0 and their sustainability goals with on-demand content available on the Hannover Messe 2024 website!
This article was edited by Georganne Benesch, Editorial Director for insight.tech.