Project Coordinator's Note
Cristina Vega Martínez, CARTIF shares her vision and plans for CAPRI.
The aim of this project is to develop, test and experiment a Cognitive Automation Platform (in short a CAP) for 3 different use cases, Asphalt, Steel and Pharmaceutical Industry with the help of a combination of sensors, information technologies and new AI algorithms that we call “Cognitive Solutions”. These use cases are industrial sectors covered in SPIRE ‘PPP’ and have a common role; they are part of the process industry which transforms raw material feedstock into intermediate and end users products. In CAPRI, these are the roads that we drive, the materials our cars are made of and the pills that we need when we are sick.
CAPRI project has started in April of this year and there have been a lot of challenges during this first part. Until now, we have mostly focused on the analysis of what we have in each industry, knowing “how is made” in each industry, the most important parameters to develop the work and all information needed to start developing such “Cognitive solutions”. This first step of searching how the process works has different challenges, such as information overload, lack of meaning of such information and what kind of information is valuable for the future. In this scenario we hope that cognitive solutions will offer a great help for people working in the use cases.
These are typical problems while starting a project. In our case, not all partners can visit the industries to clarify this, because there are a lot of restrictions to join people due COVID-19, so visits are very restricted and the part to know “how is made” in each industry was more complicated.
CAPRI project is not only about cognitive solutions in 3 industries. The 3 use cases will have the CAP in common. The development of this platform is something new for the automation and scientific people who do not develop software. CAPRI team is learning to show the needs for the software architects, so they can develop the CAP. The overall objective of CAPRI is to work on the CAP for achieving Process Industry Digital Transformation by Cognitive Solutions that provide existing process industries flexibility, improvement of the performance and quality control of its products during the manufacturing process.
During the second week of September, we held the 2nd General meeting. We had to do it online, like we did in the Kick of Meeting of the project. COVID-19 has affected everybody’s lives and jobs one way or another. In our case, we needed a bit more effort to understand the industries and the explanations of the people in the meetings. When you talk face to face everything gets easier, so we expect to do so in our next review meeting.