Development of Industry 4.0 Applications Based on Big Data Analytics to Improve the Production Processes

The research project titled “Development of Industry 4.0 Applications Based on Big Data Analytics to Improve the Production Processes”, carried out by Kadir Has University in cooperation with Borçelik is supported by the TÜBİTAK BİDEB 2244 Industrial PhD Program. The PhD students working on the project improve themselves theoretically at the university with their academic supervisors’ help and have a chance of putting into practice this theoretical information with the guidance of their industry advisors at the company Borçelik.

 

Kadir Has University cooperates with the R&D Center of Borçelik, the first and largest manufacturer of galvanized steel in Turkey within the organization of Borusan Group, for an important project: Asst. Prof. E. Fatih Yetkin from the Department of Management Information Systems coordinates the research project titled “Development of Industry 4.0 Applications Based on Big Data Analytics to Improve the Production Processes” put into practice in cooperation with the R&D Center, which focuses on the development of processes, technologies, and products in addition to studies relating to products and materials, and intensively carries out digital transformation projects. The budget of this project that is supported within the framework of the TÜBİTAK BİDEB 2244 Industrial PhD Program is TL 1,451,688 and, the project team consists of 7 active team members. This project started on July 15, 2020, and will operate for eight years.

The primary purpose of this research project is to train PhD students who will then be able to combine the theoretical aspects of the field with the practices at the market and actively perform R&D activities. This project also aims to develop new scientific methods capable of optimizing the production process of smart industrial automation systems as a whole based on sensor technologies that have come into prominence in recent years. The PhD students are expected to convey what they will experience during this process through working in the R&D department of the company and thus combine the scientific working techniques with the production processes.

The PhD students actively studying the project activities are now working half-time at the company with a chance of better understanding the engineering designs behind the production lines and focusing the analyses of frequently encountered problems and the reasons thereof. Within the framework of these initial efforts, they have started to develop a data-supported digital twin capable of real-time analyzing the data from sensors at the production line and predicting possible errors that may occur on the system. Once this study has been completed, the researchers who will take charge of the project will continue pattern recognition based activities intended to predict the results of high-cost tests making use of the digital twin through designing affordable, efficient, and (almost) real-time machine learning models, to predict and revise periodical maintenance requirements at low cost and improve the production quality.

3 PhD Scholarship Students who are to be trained at the KHAS Management Information Systems PhD Program within the scope of the project will be employed by Borçelik to take place in the new projects to be initiated by Borçelik in the light of the then-current technological advancements that could be applied in the processes for the production of galvanized steel. The PhD students who will work on these projects will be specialized in the fields of “Machine learning-based failure prediction,” “Prediction of production quality results through a digital twin,” and “Identification of anomalies through image processing.”

Those who would like to take place in the team of this long-termed project are free to apply by sending a CV to [email protected].