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Interview

“In the future, we will be able to locate the interfaces between IT and production devices anywhere.”

Interview with Dr. Tobias Voigt, co-founder of the Weihenstephaner Standards at the Department for Food Packaging Technology at the Technical University in Munich.

Market demands are becoming more specialized, requiring increasing flexibility from companies in the processing industry. To be able to react to the market, production must be quickly convertible, and in the best case is controlled by manufacturer-independent systems. In addition, the relevant data must be constantly available in order to be evaluated and used in a targeted way. Dr. Tobias Voigt explained in an interview with us how uniform standards help to structure processes and communication, and which challenges need to be mastered.

Herr Dr. Voigt, adaptable production is an important topic, particularly in the processing industry. How does this look, specifically in the area of food production and packaging?

Industrial food production and packaging occurs in large amounts and uses high performance systems. However, the variety of items has expanded greatly in the last few years, and continues to do so even more rapidly. This requires smaller batch sizes and higher levels of flexibility at packaging systems. To be able to continue to economically produce despite the increase in the necessary conversions and retrofitting processes, automation and networking of various departments and subsystems are increasingly required.

What exactly is covered by the Weihenstephaner Standards?

The Weihenstephaner Standards specify communication between food production and packaging machines and higher level IT systems. If a food producer or packer wants to comprehensively monitor production, the production devices must provide the data relevant for this. In addition, the machines and production IT must speak the same language. Therefore, the Weihenstephaner Standards precisely define the data, in content and format, that machines must provide for efficiency monitoring to ensure quality assurance or internal traceability. They also define how the communication should be carried out technically, and how the data can be evaluated.

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The Weihenstephaner Standards originated from a research project more than 15 years ago. Can you explain the developments since then?

They were quickly adopted in the beverage filling and also in the food packaging sectors. We have continued to develop the standards based on feedback from industry. In the meat industry (WS Food), the resonance was more measured, because very few networks are involved here, or they function only in proprietary islands. The next few years will show us how WS Bake develops. The first new system projects incorporating the specifications from WS Bake are already in design. New challenges have developed from batch production in breweries and from cybersecurity. As a start, we initiated the WS Brew project at the beginning of this year. In the “WS goes OPC UA” initiative, we define precisely how WS data can be transmitted more securely using the increasingly established OPC UA standard as opposed to the encrypted WS protocol.

Are the Weihenstephaner Standards limited exclusively to Germany or is international implementation also relevant for you?

It is quite clear that we have always thought internationally with regard to the Weihenstephaner Standards. Specifications limited to Germany could never be considered “Standard”, and they have already been incorporated by international food and beverage companies, as well as many of the equipment manufacturers serving the global market. In the packaging sector, we are also working with the OMAC Packaging Workgroup, which primarily affects the US. Our standard language for documents and definitions is English. And, precisely to make the use and incorporation as easy as possible for German mid-sized companies, the Weihenstephaner Standards will always be published in German.

The Weihenstephaner Standards have, up until now, been primarily used in the food and beverage industry. They have been differentiated over time into systems like WS Bake, WS Food, and WS Pack. What are the differences?

In the protocol (WS protocol) and the principle approach, there are no distinctions. The diversification occurred specifically for the evaluation and MES function descriptions necessary for respective applications and the data points defined for this. For example, WS Pack specifically includes data profiles for beverage filling machines, while WS Food includes those for vacuum filling machines. However, they intersect with regard to foundational data (e.g., machine states or production counters).

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What specific advantages did, e.g., the food industry, gain from the Weihenstephaner Standards?

Food operations are under high cost pressures and must function efficiently, sustainably, flexibly, and with almost no losses. To achieve this, they track their products precisely during production. They have incorporated extended IT systems with interfaces for production for this purpose. If these interfaces have to be individually adjusted to the different ‘languages’ and contents of the machines and systems from different manufacturers, then this networking would be complex and expensive. However, if the meat processing operation specifies maintenance of the Weihenstephaner Standards during design of new production systems, the availability of relevant data is ensured, the individual cost of interface programming is reduced, and this saves a substantial proportion of system implementation costs.

Would it be theoretically possible to open the Weihenstephaner Standards for other industries, or do they only apply to the food sector?

That is possible. We know that shoe polish and face cream packaging firms and also pharmaceutical companies have aligned themselves with the Weihenstephaner Standards. The foundational data profiles can be used by them just as well. However, this would require addition supplementation which is project specific.

Is there a specific level of automation that a production must achieve in order to be able to implement the Weihenstephaner Standards?

Theoretically, all Weihenstephaner data could be recorded via a handheld input terminal and converted manually to IT specifications. However, the Standards were not developed for this. Application is really only logical if automated production devices are linked and most of the data is exchanged online.

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