More than 60 industrial companies participated in the development of Omlox, a technology that is said will make Industry 4.0 a reality.
The factory of tomorrow is intelligently networked, such that all production steps are digitally mapped (with a "digital twin") and linked to one another to facilitate data exchange. Industrial real-time locating is an important driving factor in achieving this goal. It already enables production processes to be tracked and controlled digitally. Even if not all machines and work steps can be integrated yet, the large quantity of location data ensures that processes are noticeably simpler.
Omlox offers the first ever standard solution for industrial locating and relevant to companies of all sizes that offer and use locating systems, especially those that work in a highly flexible production environment. It unites all location services available on the market ‒ including UWB, WLAN, BLE, GPS, and 5G ‒ and transfers these into a uniform coordinate reference system, making them available for internal use on edge platforms or for global use in a cloud.
This means that the technology supports, for the first time, the use of all location technologies, bundling position data to enable targeted optimisation of process flows. Omlox is an interoperable ecosystem that harmonises heterogeneous technical infrastructures, making IIoT and Industry 4.0 affordable for SMEs.
The Hermes Award was made by a jury under chair Prof. Dr. Reimund Neugebauer, president of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. He said: “Every year, the Hermes Award recognises an exceptional, innovative product. This year, we also found a worthy award winner among the numerous applications: Trumpf points the way to a versatile, standardised, and flexible production environment. Jointly developed by 60 industrial companies, it is the first open and interoperable standard for location services. The integrative solution makes it easier to use hardware and software from various manufacturers, right up to plug-and-play, a step that companies consistently rate as very helpful."
