Towards self-operating mills – Industrial NEXUS brings together leading technology experts

Industrial NEXUS is Valmet’s five-year research and development program that aims to address skill and labor shortages while strengthening industry competitiveness. The program is divided into two streams: connected and self-operating mills and plants, and self-learning processes and full lifecycle.

“In the Stream 1, we focus on technologies that enable production to move towards increasingly self-operating mills and plants. This requires new solutions ranging from measurements and data to analytics and optimization, and ultimately the orchestration of mill-wide operations,” says Harri Mustonen, who leads Stream 1 at Valmet.

From automation towards self-operation

The six sub-streams form a development path towards self-operating mills and plants. The foundation is built on high-quality data, future measurement technologies and quality management. Building on these, the focus moves to optimizing asset performance and reliability, developing self-operating mill solutions and, ultimately, orchestrated, intelligent production. The goal is for automation to increasingly optimize production and quality and to proactively identify maintenance needs.

At the same time, the role of people shifts from operating processes to setting production, quality and financial targets and overseeing the overall operation.

“Self-operation aims to improve production efficiency and quality while reducing costs. At the same time, technology helps address skills shortages and enables expert knowledge to be utilized remotely across several mills and plants,” Mustonen explains.

Leading expertise across a broad range of technologies

Achieving the Stream 1 goal requires a wide range of expertise, including measurement technology, machine vision and data collection to analytics, modeling, optimization, AI solutions, and maintenance technologies.

“No single company can have leading expertise in all these areas. Through collaboration, we are looking for new perspectives on how to develop the solutions.”

Valmet brings to the ecosystem its understanding of the industrial environment, processes and customers, as well as insight of how individual technologies fit into the overall plant. For partners, this collaboration provides an opportunity to develop their

own expertise based on real industrial needs, gain new perspectives and accelerate development through joint R&D projects.

“By bringing together different areas of expertise, we can develop solutions that none of us could build alone,” Mustonen concludes.

The Stream 2 of Industrial NEXUS broadens the focus to self-learning processes and the full lifecycle, ensuring that technologies are utilized effectively.