Around the world, decarbonization efforts are gaining steam, driven by the issues of global warming and resource depletion. Efforts to promote carbon neutrality now have a major impact on corporate value. Greenhouse gas emissions reductions and the introduction of renewable energy have become important criteria for evaluating companies from an ESG* perspective. In Japan, as well, the national government, local governments, and corporations are implementing various measures to help bring about carbon neutrality. Against this backdrop, the Toshiba Group is working, both at the group level and in individual complexes and plants, to visualize energy usage and CO2 emissions and to engage in environmentally friendly, sustainable corporate activities. In this article, we will look at Toshiba’s ideas on how the manufacturing industry can promote carbon neutrality, the implementation of these ideas using digital transformation (DX), and Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories, a Toshiba solution that assists in these initiatives.

* ESG: Environment, Social, and Governance. ESG considerations are seen as essential for a company to grow sustainably. Financial institutions place a great deal of importance on ESG when making financing decisions, and companies weigh ESG greatly in their management and investment decisions.

In 2020, the Japanese government declared its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, completely eliminating net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Accomplishing this will require decarbonization management throughout entire supply chains, which include procurement, manufacturing, delivery, and sales. Companies are accelerating their decarbonization management activities.

The keys to decarbonization management in the manufacturing industry, and to GHG emissions reductions from factories and plants in particular, are promoting energy saving, introducing renewable energy, and utilizing carbon offsets*. Efficiently using energy also reduces costs, so a growing number of companies are tackling the challenge of energy saving. Energy loss occurs throughout Japanese manufacturing sites. Examples include the use of standby equipment for power, the inefficient use of energy in production activities, and the generation and supply of water that is cooled or heated beyond what is actually necessary. To reduce the amount of energy loss at production sites while maintaining their productivity and the comfort of their environments requires production lines to be operated efficiently. It also requires the operation of power equipment to be optimized throughout plants.

* Carbon offset: Investing in measures for offsetting CO2 emissions by investing in equivalent amounts of CO2 emissions reductions, resulting in net zero emissions. One form of carbon offset is the issuing of carbon credits, which certify GHG emissions reductions, and the trading of carbon credits between companies.

However, this is no easy feat. Highly effective measures must be prioritized, based on energy usage conditions in individual sites and taking into consideration costs and work volume. Even if improvements are made, when there are changes in conditions affecting worksites, such as their environments, products, or equipment, further actions must be taken to respond to these changes. To deliberate these measures and handle them on an ongoing basis, it is vital that sites are able to continuously acquire, manage, and visualize energy usage information. They must have systems for assessing current energy usage conditions.

While progress is being made toward carbon neutrality, another pressing issue facing the manufacturing industry is the labor shortage that is resulting from the shrinking of the working-age population. To address this issue, digital technologies are being used to reduce the workloads involved in onsite work, such as performing periodic equipment inspections and dealing with equipment failures, and other operations, such as creating reports regarding equipment operation conditions. This allows people to focus on core operations. Equipment and devices are being integrated with the IoT to visualize conditions and detect signs of irregularities. Operations are being optimized and equipment operation is being automated and autonomized. These are being achieved through the multi-stage advancement of operation and maintenance (O&M) (Fig. 1).

Specifically, first, the IoT is used to acquire log data from equipment and devices and visualize their status. Remotely monitoring and managing equipment and devices reduces the workload involved in on-site observation and inspection. Next, based on the status of the equipment and devices, along with past data, trend analysis and AI are used to detect signs of irregularities. This preventative maintenance approach reduces the amount of emergency on-site response needed to deal with equipment or device stoppages caused by accidents or irregularities.

Furthermore, the operating status of all equipment and devices, the operation procedures used by personnel and the know-how associated with those operations, and knowledge from veteran operators are put in data form and imported into the system. This makes it possible for the system to provide assistance to operators using virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR), which improves the overall efficiency of plant operations. The accrued data regarding equipment, devices, and operations can also be used in the automation and autonomation of equipment operation. In this way, advances in O&M help create an environment that lets people focus their work on core tasks and, at the same time, enables enterprises to deal with the issue of labor force shrinkage.

The advancement of O&M is also an effective way to contribute to carbon neutrality. Not only does it offer the benefits of efficiency improvements for overall plant operations, but it also provides mechanisms for assessing actual energy and GHG conditions, which are vital for deliberating and continuously implementing measures for achieving carbon neutrality.

Toshiba Digital Solutions offers the Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories, which supports efforts to achieve carbon neutrality. Let’s look at some examples of usage within the Toshiba Group.

First, let’s consider the carbon neutrality promotion measures being carried out across the entire Toshiba Group. These measures involve numerous Group companies, complexes, and plants. All information must be centralized and collected in one place, and there is a need for a system that enables individual companies to autonomously identify issues related to energy saving and make ongoing improvements.

Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories is being used to visualize data collected from various sites, such as energy usage amounts and CO2 emissions amounts, and to keep an eye on progress on individual key performance indicators (KPI) at the Group, company, and plant levels. The whole Toshiba Group is now working as one to achieve carbon neutrality by using mechanisms for gathering information, such as their power usage levels, from individual sites and using that information to determine CO2 emissions equivalents. These amounts, power usage amounts, information used in CO2 emissions prediction and actual emissions management, data trends that assist in discovering irregularities, lists of improvement measures, and the measurement results of improvement activities are all displayed on-screen to assist in these efforts.

The next usage examples are the optimized energy usage and worksite digitalization initiatives being carried out by our Yokohama Complex. Energy demand is being predicted with a high level of accuracy, and this information is being used to formulate optimized equipment operation plans that minimize energy costs and CO2 emissions. Equipment is automatically controlled based on these operation plans. The Yokohama Complex has moved away from formulating operation plans based on rules of thumb, which were highly dependent on the individuals making the plans. Instead, the new system reflects various perspectives to operate equipment in a way that improves overall efficiency (Fig. 2).

Specifically, Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories is integrated with an optimization engine provided by TOSHIBA SPINEX for Energy*. The user can use the system to estimate daily demand for power, including electrical and gas power, based on weather information and past power data, and create operation plans for individual pieces of equipment. These plans indicate at what times the equipment is to be shut down and at what times it is to be operated. One of Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories’ features is that it can send the configuration information necessary for operation to the corresponding equipment.

* TOSHIBA SPINEX for Energy is a service provided by Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions Corporation.

Worksite digitalization also includes automating data collection and improving the efficiency of the process used to create work reports and other documents. This has reduced the amount of labor-intensive work performed on-site. For example, operations such as equipment maintenance, regular inspections, and troubleshooting have been digitalized. Staff can go on-site with just a tablet and see the operating status, past inspection data, and other information for individual pieces of equipment. They can also register inspection results and work reports. The system is a great asset to on-site operations.

In addition, in the new manufacturing building at Toshiba’s Fuchu Complex, detailed operational conditions and energy usage, as well as environmental information such as temperature and humidity, are visualized for each floor and device. Digital signage shows operating status data in real-time on each floor, and every employee can see information on energy usage conditions. The aim is to foster a mentality focused on conserving energy while maintaining productivity and comfort, thereby establishing a PDCA cycle for energy-saving activities that will help the site achieve carbon neutrality. Furthermore, in the Komukai Complex and Corporate Research & Development Center, in order to carry out standard operations while also using the facilities to verify cutting-edge technologies, the power data collected in the Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories is used in verification experiments and research. Each site is using the system to work toward carbon neutrality.

The Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories assists factories and plants in their carbon neutrality initiatives. It digitalizes various information related to factory and plant facility management and upkeep works, performs integrated management, improves the efficiency of upkeep works, and reduces equipment operation energy consumption.

These strengths of the service can be leveraged to perform centralized management of sites and equipment around the world. This service can collect data such as equipment operating status information and energy usage information to enable remote monitoring, visualization from a multitude of perspectives, and AI analysis, all at the level of granularity desired by users, whether it be the site level or the individual device level. Toshiba has also created standard visualization templates. For example, the system’s dashboard can be used to view site locations, KPI, events, and the like on maps or in lists. Users can view signal trends and conditions for the specific equipment they are interested in. They can use process diagrams created in advance to view various status data based on power data and manufacturing processes. They can also view the different power trends discussed in the usage examples presented earlier.

One of the key points of the system is that when visualizing power trends, it does not just visualize electrical power, but also water and gas (heat) using supply and demand plan values, actual usage values, and future forecasts in unified and comprehensive visualizations. It helps improve energy usage efficiency by providing system users with a bird’s eye view of surplus capacity for each type of energy and information regarding long-term trends. These functions are indispensable for achieving carbon neutrality.

Toshiba’s asset integration data platform plays an important role in the collection and accumulation of IoT data. This platform leverages the equipment running and maintenance expertise that Toshiba has developed through its many years of experience with social infrastructure and industry. It is the crystallization of Toshiba’s knowledge regarding the relationships between different data and how to organize that data. This data platform enables users to quickly and easily utilize detailed data, tailored to individual site operations, through the Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories. The asset integration data platform also supports Asset Administration Shell (AAS). AAS is an open standard that offers the asset connectivity and mutual operability that are key elements of Industry 4.0. Devices and equipment that employ AAS concepts and support the AAS standard, used by various companies around the world, can be easily connected to the asset integration data platform. Therefore, data can be quickly acquired and put to use. The platform also supports the collection of data via standard transmission protocols used in various industries, such as OPC-UA, Modbus/TCP, and BACnet/IP, and through FTP file transfer. Because of this design, it can be deployed quickly.

Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories, which uses the asset integration data platform to achieve even higher levels of data collection and utilization, includes a large number of components and services, provided in the form of a cloud service that helps take O&M to a higher level (Fig. 3).

In addition to the aforementioned data collection, storage, and management, and the visualization of equipment, power, and the like, it also provides a bevy of other functions. These include remote login to equipment and devices on different sites, operation support such as system monitoring or outage and inquiry response, and support for user-defined formats for use in creating regular reports. These user-defined formats can also be used to perform automatic calculations and data aggregation and output reports. Data regarding on-site maintenance and regular inspections can be entered and completed on-site using a tablet device. The asset integration data platform can be integrated with form applications, and users can also customize user interfaces to fit their own operations.

For data analysis, the system can be integrated with SATLYS, Toshiba’s analytics AI, which leverages our extensive manufacturing expertise and track record. This enables the system to provide high-precision forecasts and detect irregularities. It can also be integrated with general business intelligence tools, so individual customers can choose the tools that are best for them when analyzing and utilizing data. It supports the selection and deployment of hardware that is best suited for social infrastructure, manufacturing sites, and customer objectives and environments, such as factory network devices, IoT gateways, and sensors.

The remote, centralized management provided by the Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories, the visualization of electricity, water, and gas usage and CO2 emissions, and the asset integration data platform, which makes data utilization fast and easy, helps improve site operation efficiency and contributes to customer business growth. As a company that aims to further advance the O&M field and assist in the realization of carbon neutrality, Toshiba Digital Solutions will continue to work to protect the global environment.

• Asset IoT Cloud Service for Factories