IoT Technical Specialist at Airbus, Maxime Saraiva, took to the stage to present how Airbus solved their global asset tracking challenge. Gain a behind-the-scenes look at the way Airbus operates and what its goals are for the future.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- IoT at Airbus is organized into three main domains: supply chain & logistics, engineering and manufacturing, and connected products.
- The company wanted to improve the supply chain, which is interlinked with over 8,000 suppliers. The goal was to show the location on the map of the items it wanted to track with its associated status.
- The end result was increased asset visibility, alerts regarding status, improved transport cycle times, reduced search time, and a reduction in the number of lost items.
- The system can be used to track virtually anything and can be deployed across all other sites. There are transversal benefits to airbus and suppliers and across other countries.
- The next steps are to take the solution worldwide and increase the number of trackable assets.
IN HIS OWN WORDS
- On how it works: “In order to meet different autonomy requirements and cost targets, Airbus has developed a special algorithm aimed at providing enough data to track things but not so much that it costs too much or fails autonomy targets. In order to do that, it defined events such as start of movement, end of movement and intermittent positions. As soon as an event is recorded, signals are received and used by the device to calculate its location. Data is sent to the network and transferred to Airbus, which allows us to display the location on a map. It’s as easy as that.”
- On a successful IoT solution: “A successful IoT service takes into account all the different business requirements and constraints of different technologies. To achieve that, Airbus had to study all of the different components of the solution to deliver something that was global, useful (lasted a long time, was accurate and easy to install), cost-effective (in terms of network fee, software license and tracking device).”
- On the next steps: ““The next steps will be to go worldwide and increase the number of Airbus sites. Increase the number of trackable assets to include tools, aircrafts on the ground and flight test equipment and provide a more extensive service in the form of measurements and functions of the device. Track temperature, humidity, vibration, shocks, etc.”
SIGFOX CONNECT
After a great success in 2017 with more than 1200 attendees and 120 booths, the Sigfox World IoT Expo is back in 2018 and becomes Sigfox Connect. Attendance is also open to the general public during the second day.
