With the hardware, the firmware, and the knowledge of the industrial world, Motive srl (www.motive.it), which has been designing and manufacturing electric motors, mechanical speed reducers and electronic frequency converters since 2000, would have made it without FERMAI. But from the possibility of having "granular" data, of a packet per second, also arose the possibility of using it to go beyond the state of the art, and thus create real artificial intelligence software that exploited "machine learning" to detect anomalous behavior of any data.
Therefore, a team of algorithm developers was also needed. In 2021, it was thus decided to create an "ad hoc" container for the new team: FERMAI.
FERMAI means "ferma mai” (never stops), or “fermai in passato” (had to stop in the past), because one of the main functions that was initially thought of was that of predictive maintenance, aimed, as we know, at avoiding machine stops. But, in our province dialect, it also means "clip", the IT icon of knowledge which is our logo. We also didn't forget to include the letters "AI", the initials of Artificial Intelligence.
In 2022, one year after the start of research and development activities, with the product still in preparation, ENEA "National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development", appointed by the Italian Ministry for Economic development, fully promotes DOCTOR 4.0 as an absolute innovation for the circular economy (the reconversion of production activities towards an economy model that maintains the value of products, materials and resources for as long as possible and which minimizes the production of waste).
Predictive maintenance is a methodology that aims to prevent plant or machinery failures through the use of data collected by specific sensors. These sensors detect key variables to determine the health of the machinery.
Thanks to the use of statistics techniques, data mining, modeling and artificial intelligence methods, the system is able to constantly analyze a huge amount of data and calculate when a sensor could go out of threshold.
But predictive maintenance is just one of the possible uses of DOCTOR 4.0. The FERMAI IIoT portal is open, application-independent, and simplifies integration
With DOCTOR 4.0 data, you can for example monitor the productivity of a plant or a machine, the flow or pressure of a pump, a fan, or a compressor, the fluid contamination, the energy consumption, you can control the quality, etc. etc.
