The social network of assets

Global supply chains, market fragmentation, mass customization, and shorter product life cycles have increased competitiveness among companies, creating the need to introduce cognitive capabilities through flexible and easily configurable production systems. Today, we are experiencing a shift toward an increasingly digitalized society and industry, where decision-making is moving from assumptions and intuition to data and analytics. This new paradigm has largely been driven by the proliferation of sensors and other devices in industrial processes, enabling larger volumes of data to be collected efficiently and in real time. Hence, there is a growing need to improve competitiveness and decision-making effectiveness.

Asset management in centralized systems can become extremely complex due to the high volume of data that must be handled. While these systems are capable of processing enormous amounts of information, bottlenecks are likely to occur, leading to delays in communication and data processing. This, in turn, results in errors, inefficiencies, and slower subsequent decision-making, significantly impacting operational efficiency and business profitability.

In this context, distributed systems offer significant advantages. Not only are they more resilient to failures or attacks, but they also provide greater transparency, and democratization of information and knowledge. Attributes such as availability, efficiency, speed, privacy, and security are some of the main advantages of distributed systems over traditional ones.

In our environment, social networks clearly emerge as a phenomenon of decentralized data and knowledge, where assets (people) share ideas and knowledge to generate individual understanding. This concept underlies the idea of a social network of assets, aimed at addressing the previously mentioned needs.

The SONETO project seeks to tackle the following challenge: “How can data, information, and knowledge be shared among fleets of assets to achieve system-level optimization?”