Festo AX

Festo AX makes digitalisation scalable and supports the advancement of Industry 4.0 in production. This means that manufacturing companies of all sizes can benefit from innovative technologies, while original equipment manufacturers can set up new business models immediately without the need for years of development work.

Steve Sands of Festo said: “We are excited to offer our customers this rapidly expanding range of solutions that make them more efficient and more productive. By using AI-supported tools, our customers can increase their competitiveness and take their production to a new level. Our AX latest Motion Insight Apps offer exactly that: easy-to-install, scalable solutions that enable effective implementation of predictive maintenance.”

Making data-driven decisions easier

The Festo AX suite currently comprises AX Industrial Intelligence, AX Solutions, AX Industrial Apps and AX Smartenance.

Festo AX Industrial Intelligence is a project based industrial software solution that uses artificial intelligence to turn plant data into actionable intelligence. It enables users to increase productivity, reduce energy costs, avoid quality losses and — in coordination with machine builders — establish new business models. Festo AX Industrial Intelligence thus enables optimisation in three typical fields of application: Predictive Maintenance, Predictive Energy and Predictive Quality. Customer experience shows optimisation rates of over 20 percent, a clear indication of how much potential there is in deploying AI-driven data and algorithms.

With Festo AX Industrial Apps, the company is utilising its application knowledge to focus in on subsystems such as welding, glueing, riveting or packaging creating scalable solutions that allow customers to install standardised AI applications themselves without needing any AI expertise.  They overcome the often-encountered gap in the application of AI that lies between the computer scientists who can model and detect anomalies in data and the real-life interpretation of the output into actionable alerts.

The latest release is the AX Motion Insights Pneumatic App. It uses machine learning AI to detect anomalies in the behaviour of pneumatic drives early and reliably, without the need for additional, complex sensor technology. This enables companies to execute preventive maintenance measures and minimise unplanned downtimes. The Festo AX Motion Insights Pneumatic App offers a user-friendly interface within the containerised app and simple integration into existing systems. It enables companies to implement the monitoring of application critical pneumatic components independently and without the need for data science specialists.

The AX Smartenance package is the ideal companion to Industrial Apps or Motion Insight packages as it offers a solution for customers’ maintenance management to digitalise and simplify maintenance and servicing processes in a consistent and intuitive way. AX Smartenance closes the loop by using notification data from the AX Apps to deliver condition-based recommendations for action to the right addressee in the maintenance process at the right time. It also provides a platform for the management of routine maintenance tasks with the ability to store all machinery documentation, drawings and multi-media information such as ‘how-to’ videos, photographs of previous fixes and links to supplier support portals.

Industrial apps also on Siemens Industrial Edge

Festo is also part of the Siemens Industrial Edge ecosystem. The Festo AX Data Insights App, available on the Siemens marketplace, feeds data from Festo components into Siemens Industrial Edge to supply analysis applications with data. Based on this data, customers can set up monitoring within the Siemens environment to improve maintenance processes, reduce their energy consumption and improve quality. More industrial apps from Festo will soon be available via this route, including versions for AI-based monitoring of pneumatic and electric drives.