Mosca receives another award from the Industry 4.0 Alliance

Artificial intelligence optimizes the order sequence in production - and employees work through it more efficiently. Mosca GmbH received the "Winner" award for this AI solution from the Industry 4.0 Baden-Württemberg Alliance on 23.10.2024 - the network's second award for an AI-based solution. With the award-winning solution, factors such as set-up time and order priority can be taken into account, their optimal sequence calculated and displayed directly on the respective machine.

Mosca GmbH in Waldbrunn processes its individual work orders particularly efficiently in production. The reason: with the help of an AI solution, the End-of-Line optimizes the sequence of the numerous orders and weighs factors such as set-up time, delay and priority of the individual items against each other. The employees are shown this optimized sequence directly at their workstations, for example during bending, turning or laser cutting, and can process it efficiently. In this way, Mosca successfully reduces set-up and throughput times while increasing production productivity. The company received the Industry 4.0 Baden-Württemberg Alliance award in the "Winner" category on 23.10.2024. The network, initiated and funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economic Affairs, supports medium-sized industrial companies on their way to Industry 4.0.

"When teaching the algorithm, we placed the highest priority on adherence to deadlines and shortening throughput times and trained the AI accordingly," explains Joachim Dencker, Plant Manager and Vice President Mosca Machinery & Equipment GmbH & Co. KG. "Other important parameters were the occupancy of the workstations and the set-up times." The status of the individual orders, for example as warehouse, assembly or spare parts orders, and the associated urgency are also part of the AI calculation. Based on this, it determines the optimum sequence of work orders for the next two weeks. If the order situation increases, this period can be adjusted so that the optimized order sequence is available more quickly.

Solution successfully in use for a year

Mosca kicked off the development of this solution together with the company One Thousand at a hackathon with Mosca. "This made the topic of AI directly tangible and made the potential applications and the goal of an optimized production process visible," explains Joachim Dencker. The application is now an integral part of Mosca 's system landscape and has been in use for a year with 40 integrated workstations in production - where it has also received positive feedback from the workforce. The results are already visible: the AI solution further increases the delivery reliability of the machines manufactured by Mosca and minimizes idle times for individual parts. Mosca is now optimizing the AI algorithm with a training loop in which the experts review what they have learned, expand the parameters and integrate new tools into the solution.   

"For us, automation and AI already offer an efficient solution to specific challenges," explains Gregor Karmowski, Group Vice President IT & Digitalization. "In particular, where a suitable data basis coincides with a corresponding potential for improvement, we can use AI to optimize or make things more efficient with significantly less effort than before." The award from the Industry 4.0 Alliance reinforces Mosca 's course: "The award is confirmation from the expert jury that we are on the right track with our solutions - towards a future in which AI will increasingly facilitate resource-efficient, digitalized production," summarizes Karmowski. Accordingly, Mosca is already planning and testing several AI projects, for example for the automated creation of quotations.