Olive sector is a relevant agriculture sector in Spain, as shown by its leading role worldwide with a production worldwide of 38%, while Italy and Greece have 20% and 13% respectively. With over 400 thousand olive growers, the sector requires a deeper professionalisation a keep competitive against other Mediterranean countries where labour cost is cheaper, as Turkey or Cypress.

The Application Experiment proposed tries to implement CPS know-how and Image Recognition technology on an olive farming cooperative for increasing its productivity on olive processing stages.

Problem and Description

Olive processing is a challenging task, requiring the quick grade and sort of olives for its classification according to different purposes as stages: raw vs processed olives, or olive oil vs cooked/pitted olives.

MULTISCAN is a food tooling manufacturing company with know-how on applying state-of-the-art machine vision technologies along with innovative product transport systems to achieve optimum sorting. Multiscan provides unique solutions for the fresh fruit and vegetables market, sorting and grading by color, size and quality, becoming the real specialist in product up to 55 mm in diameter. Moreover, Multiscan designs and supplies X-ray technology systems for safety and conformity applications in the food industry.

MULTISCAN expertise is focused on tooling for grading and sorting Olives, Cherries or Cherry Tomatoes, being olives its main relevant business.

MULTISCAN increase the added-value of its products through the integration of the machines with MES systems that will demonstrate the production benefits of using MULTISCAN machine in their customers (cooperatives and large customers).

The objective of the application is to transfer HUB-4-MANUVAL DIH know-how on robotics and MES systems (UPV), and Edge/Cloud architectures, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics (ITI). That expertise will be integrated on MULTISCAN machines and software through the use of standard industrial M2M communication protocols, as OPC UA, to develop high-value customised processes on the olive manipulation. For this purpose, an olive farming cooperative will provide the facilities and will validate the developed proposal.

AE Description

HUB4MANUVAL Digital Innovation Hub expertise on Robotics, CPS/IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Valencian manufacturing SMEs and MidCaps will prove valuable for the business case. The HUB will support manufacturing companies in order to be more competitive, prioritizing SMEs in the manufacturing sectors of relevance at Regional Level. The previous know-how on Agriculture, hunting and forestry sector with projects such as “CPS based on vision systems“ (https://bit.ly/2FPmEaz) emphasis the value proposition that UPV and ITI, as coordinator and partner of the DIH, can bring to MULTISCAN to solve the problem in scope.

Partner & Expertise:

UPV	HUB-4-MANUVAL DIH coordinator. MES development and customization. IoT and M2M protocol expertise.
MULTISCAN	Design and supply of X-ray technology systems for safety and conformity applications in the food industry for sorting and grading
ITI	HUB-4-MANUVAL DIH partner. Hybrid architectures edge-cloud to deploy real time optimization processes. Artificial Intelligence applied to Cyber Physical Systems for self learning. Big Data Analytics.

For further information, please visit https://dih4cps.eu/experiment-06/