ROCKWELL AUTOMATION AND MICROSOFT ANNOUNCE SIGNIFICANT TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATIONS

With Rockwell’s FactoryTalk edge and cloud solutions, manufacturers bring together artificial intelligence, IoT, and automation solutions to allow people, processes, and technology to operate seamlessly between physical and digital environments. With Microsoft Azure’s adaptive cloud approach, manufacturers can unify and streamline siloed teams, sites and systems while scaling applications and insights. Together, Rockwell and Microsoft will provide cutting-edge industrial transformation solutions across the value chain, rapidly and at scale, with AI-assisted design, connected data, and agile production optimization.

Additionally, the recently announced partnership between NVIDIA, Rockwell and Microsoft allows the creation, real-time management, and simulation of digital twins that will be accelerated with the use of Microsoft’s AI-assisted tools and cloud technology.

Finally, with the integration of Rockwell Automation’s Plex manufacturing execution system (MES) with FactoryTalk^® DataMosaix™ and Microsoft’s Cloud for Manufacturing, manufacturers benefit from transformative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help drive productivity, safety, and quality. These tools focus on resolving quality issues with corrective actions and root cause analysis.

Bringing the intelligent factory to life
Innovative exhibits demonstrate how integrated digital twins and generative AI expedite time-to-market as organizations and systems scale. One exhibit shows how to connect digital and physical assets for autonomous intelligent factories. It utilizes digital design with differentiated digital twin simulation and artificial intelligence through FactoryTalk Design Studio Copilot for a simplified customer experience of industrial operations.

Also on display is a digital twin simulation of a quality inspection process, inspired by Rockwell’s customer Nestlé. The digital simulation is augmented by a physical installation of product sorting and autonomous material handling for packaging. Production line sorting is represented through a factory digital twin, imitating the manufacturing of one of Nestlé’s products.

An OTTO 100, an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) from OTTO Motors by Rockwell Automation, will demonstrate the movement of packaged materials through the factory, showcasing how automated material movement can help improve production throughput and employee resources. The final section of the system displays analytical production dashboards in Microsoft Azure, highlighting real-time, contextualized data egress to the cloud.

Highlighting the power of Azure’s adaptive cloud approach
Rockwell is also an integral part of Microsoft’s flagship Hannover Messe display, where attendees will step into a design, operate, and maintain an environment for factories of the future. Here, manufacturers will experience how to unlock agile production optimization, AI-enhanced decision-making, and repeatable cutting-edge transformation at scale, using an adaptive cloud approach to unify people, data, and systems. Microsoft is using several Rockwell Automation hardware and software solutions, along with technologies from the Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork™ ecosystem in bringing this vision to reality.