Nexans, RISE, and Chalmers Receive Funding to Develop a Search Engine for Process Data

A dedicated Chat GPT to answer questions, provide insights, and help us understand our own process data? Together with RISE and Chalmers, we are taking the first steps to make this a reality.

On November 1, the second phase of Nexans' collaboration with Chalmers and RISE begins as part of the digitalization project DFusion.

To analyze the machine data we collect from various machines in our factory, we need assistance with analysis and with prioritizing what to focus on. In a three-year project we call DFusion, PhD students from Chalmers and RISE have helped us explore and propose ways to manage our own collected data.

A Digital Assistant Would Be Valuable
During this work, it became clear that the company would gain tremendous value from a digital assistant, a kind of local search engine, which could help our operators, team leaders, and managers troubleshoot, prioritize, and suggest possible solutions to arising issues. It would also inform them if similar problems have occurred before and how we resolved them.

Although this data already exists and previous projects have developed a method to reduce its complexity, the process is still extensive enough that finding the right data, analyzing it, and suggesting solutions takes too long to be genuinely useful for an operator needing real-time answers.

A Fruitful Collaboration Between Industry, Academia, and Government
Therefore, Nexans, together with Chalmers and RISE, will develop a tool to support operators in selecting parameters. The tool—our own search engine—will search through and identify what previously led to high quality under similar combinations of factors, such as environment, materials, processes, and machinery.

-- This is the way we need to work in the future. We want to be part of teams with researchers and other companies so that we can jointly develop the digital solutions we need. Alone, we neither have the resources nor the knowledge, says Plant Manager Carl-Johan Ahl.

-- It will be incredibly exciting to develop a truly sharp language model together. I hope and believe that we will greatly benefit from such a tool—a local Chat GPT, says Digital Factory Leader Perparim Sylejmani.