Advanced positioning technologies to improve productivity, safety and logistics in Industry 4.0

The NONDAGO research project, in which Ceit is involved, will invest more than 2 million euros to optimise plant processes in real-time

The centre will be responsible for designing new positioning devices and developing new information management technologies for data visualisation and decision making.

As Industry 4.0 moves towards the factory of the future, new technologies, solutions and services based on positioning systems need to be developed to improve the productivity, logistics and safety of plant operations.

It was in this context that a consortium of Basque companies and technology centres, including Ceit, launched the NONDAGOproject last year with the aim of developing new positioning technologies to optimise the real-time monitoring of all the moving parts of a production plant and take a step further towards the factory of the future.

To achieve this, the project consortium, which is funded by the Basque Government through the HAZITEK 2021 programme, will invest 2 million euros to design new tracking devices capable of operating in hostile environments, implement advanced data analytics models and develop advanced software solutions for tracking products, people and industrial vehicles.

More specifically, the project will develop and optimise more than 10 industrial positioning products and services applied to specific cases such as tracking the movements of cranes and forklifts, changes in moulds and tooling, and monitoring people in confined spaces. Therefore, the aim is to optimise in-plant movements and send alerts with the support of positioning systems based on UWB (ultra-wideband signals) and data analytics, so as to improve the safety of operations and reduce production times and costs.

Process optimisation

The Ceit technology centre is involved in the project by adapting its UWB-based positioning systems technology to validate it in different in-plant applications such as monitoring and tracking overhead cranes and industrial vehicles or monitoring people in confined spaces.

According to Igone Vélez, director of Ceit's Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) division and head of the project at the centre, Ceit is working on three lines of research ranging from “developing new positioning devices capable of operating in hostile environments, designing new advanced analytical algorithms that make it possible to monitor production processes more effectively, and developing new information management technologies for data visualisation and decision-making”.

The development of these new advanced technological positioning solutions will make it possible to optimise processes in the industrial sector, and have a positive impact on the development of the end product, by using fewer resources and having a lower environmental impact.

About NONDAGO

NONDAGO is an innovation project on advanced positioning technologies to improve productivity, safety and logistics in Industry 4.0 and factories of the future. The consortium of entities involved in the project complements each other in addressing the challenge of process optimisation in the industrial sector from the perspective of positioning as the driving force.

The NONDAGO research project is made up of a consortium of Basque companies and centres, led by Deusto Seidor,and including the Ceit technology centre, a member of the Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), the Basque Mobility and Logistics Cluster, and the companies DOMINION and its Environmental Services and R&D team, Geograma, IDK, i2U,SEGULA Technologies and VI4Crane.