Data Collection and Reporting

The topic of the first students' meeting was data collection and reporting. The first part of the week consisted of workshops prepared by the students. After introducing and ice-breaking activities for students from different countries, the program continued with a workshop by the Czech students from Nový Jičín.

The topic of the Czech program was data collection and robotics. The students showed how to collect and save data using robots. The participants then together programmed a few types of tasks for getting and saving data.

Norwegian students prepared the topic of designing and creating relational databases. In their program, they showed their colleagues how to make databases. The Austrian participants ran the last student workshop. Their students prepared a web application allowing maintenance of a database.

The second part of the program took place in the Applied Technical Systems (ATS) company. The plan was focused on the principles of automation of production.

Students attended engaging workshops about architectures of data collecting, handling of the production line with PLC, examples of data collecting, database, and data reporting during the two days. In particular, the ATS workshop itself was focused on one of the main MES functions – analysis of the efficiency of a production process in a manufacturing facility (e.g., a car manufacturer). Typically this consists of first gathering data from the production equipment:

• production counters (number of produced cars, number of cars with defects)

• amounts of consumed material and energy

• production time duration per car

• reasons for downtimes (breakdowns of equipment)

• the time necessary to make the repairs

All of this data is stored in a relational SQL database. Web-based reports pull the massive amounts of data for the database and present it in understandable portions of information. Standardized metrics in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs) are usually implemented in the report. Among the most used KPIs are, for example, MTBF (mean time between failure), adherence to plan (ATP), and overall equipment efficiency (OEE).

The workshop participants were 7 pupils from each partner school and accompanying persons – the teachers who for 4 months before solved job tasks created. Solving process and results of the work consulted these teachers and pupils together and shared (online conferencing, skype calls, shared cloud storage, social network, e-mails) already during the work before realizing the workshop itself. All participants from all schools were, therefore, well prepared for the implementation of the workshop itself.

Sightseeing in historic towns of Kroměříž a Štramberk was also part of the event.