Interconnection, modularity, diagnostics: Industry 4.0 in vehicle assistance

The vehicle assistance equipment sector encompasses such a vast field of segments and intervention areas that products must evolve incessantly. The customers of vehicle service equipment are represented by both tire and mechanic workshops, and vehicle manufacturers, in particular for end-of-line testing and homologation activities. The sectors of intervention of the manufacturers of this type of machinery are therefore so diversified as to require addressing and resolving all the problems relating to the directionality and structure of the vehicles, to the diagnosis and regulation of the braking systems, of the suspensions and emissions of the drain. Furthermore, the paradigm of “Industry 4.0” is also significantly impacting this area, allowing the development of new business models and a revolutionary approach to managing the product life cycle.

Consistently with these premises, the SUNRISE project (StrUmeNti for the service on the Innovative, Safe and Efficient Wheel), funded by the Emilia-Romagna Region (“Interventions in favor of the industrial research of companies operating in the sectors most involved in the seismic events of May 2012” – (Ord. 109 of 2013-), and carried out by Corghi SPA (leading company in the production of equipment for vehicle service) has had as its objective the design and development of a new generation of balancing machines and tire changers, which could , on the one hand, incorporating significant improvements in their characteristic functions, and, on the other, combining multiple functions within the same product, all of which has been concretized by monitoring developments, and integrating them where possible, with technologies related to the so-called “ fourth industrial revolution “, as Industrial Internet of Things and Cloud Computing.