Productive 4.0 food industry

Promis­ing to feed the smooth tran­si­tion towards increas­ing­ly intel­li­gent and inter­net-con­nect­ed sys­tems in the food indus­try, Piab is intro­duc­ing piS­MART ver­sions of its most advanced vac­u­um equip­ment. Aimed pri­mar­i­ly at boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and ener­gy-effi­cien­cy, piS­MART sys­tems will also offer new tools for guar­an­tee­ing that pro­ce­dures always adhere to reg­u­la­tions and stan­dards for food hygiene and food safety.
With clean­li­ness being of vital impor­tance in the food indus­try, new “big data” analy­sis tools for con­di­tion mon­i­tor­ing and pre­dic­tive main­te­nance will be par­tic­u­lar­ly wel­come. Data for these tools will be fed from both strate­gi­cal­ly placed sen­sors in equip­ment and from the cloud, sup­port­ing both oper­a­tor-con­trolled and auto­mat­i­cal­ly reg­u­lat­ed processes.
Start­ing with piCOM­PACT, Piab’s flag­ship all-in-one vac­u­um ejec­tor series, the addi­tion of piS­MART will even­tu­al­ly also extend to oth­er high-end ejec­tors as well as con­vey­ors and lift­ing sys­tems. The piCOM­PACT is already avail­able with gener­ic and field­bus-inde­pen­dent input/output tech­nol­o­gy IO-Link, enabling a high degree of on-board intel­li­gence. Piab’s adop­tion of IO-Link is an impor­tant key to the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty required in Indus­try 4.0 pro­cess­ing units, and the addi­tion of piS­MART shows that Piab is now ready for the high­er lev­el of process con­trol sup­port­ed by cloud-based “big data” that this fourth indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion will realise.