How can digitalisation boost Industry’s competitiveness? INESC TEC promotes webinars to address this issue

INESC TEC TEC4Industry is promoting a series of webinars “How to Take on the Recovery and Resilience of Industry – Digitalise towards Competitiveness”. The goal is to present the current digital technologies, the real application in the Portuguese industry fabric, and the impact on business development.  

The next session (four planned) will take place in June and explore the theme of immersive reality. According to António Almeida, Business Developer of TEC4Industry, “our ambition is to promote R&D projects and advanced manufacturing technologies made in Portugal, associated with the fourth industrial revolution”. 

The first session of this series took place in April and brought together INESC TEC researchers and EFACEC and Infinite Foundry representatives to decode how these companies explore the use of Digital Twin. More specifically, the workshop aimed to explain how INESC TEC and EFACEC resort to the concept of products’ DT to promote new business models; and to showcase how the company is using Infinity Foundry’s DT platform to digitalise, monitor, understand and control manufacturing systems. But what is a Digital Twin? According to António Almeida, it’s a digital replica of a physical system that can be used to test and simulate scenarios, enabling predictions and the real-time monitoring of performance”. This innovative technology has been playing a key role in the space and automotive sectors, but also in the fields of energy and cities of the future. 

“Thanks to digital twins, professionals from several areas can test solutions in virtual environments before applying them in the real world. It merges real-time data from different technologies, which can reduce the development time and costs of products and systems, while increasing the security of industrial processes”, he claimed. 

Helena Lopes and Hélder Almeida (EFACEC), André Luz, CEO of Infinite Foundry and António Lucas Soares, coordinator of INESC TEC Centre for Enterprise Systems Engineering (CESE), also attended the session. 

The Transformer 4.0 (TRF4.0) project was also mentioned at the event – in initiative that brings together complementing research competencies: EFACEC, power transformer manufacturer, INESC TEC, INEGI and MIT, through the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. 

The Transformer 4.0, led by INESC TEC, promotes the digital transformation of power transformers; in this sense, the DT enables disruptive approaches in the design and manufacturing of transformers, introducing new communication models and providing novel added value services i.e., smart monitoring of service conditions, preventive maintenance, and aging assessment. 

The TEC4Industry series of webinars comprehends four sessions, and it focuses on bringing together Portuguese tech companies from the industry sector until the end of the year. “Immersive Reality for Augmented Operators” is the topic of the upcoming session.