Smart Retrofit Architecture: Enhancing sustainability of Industrial Equipment in Small-Medium Enterprises

Introducing the Industry 4.0 paradigm poses a new challenge to companies that must incorporate new smart technologies into their business assets to remain competitive. Digitisation and sustainability are constraints for companies' competitiveness. This article proposes the Smart Retrofit Architecture to integrate hardware and software parts into non-Industry 4.0 systems and machines from an interoperability perspective. In this way, the Smart Retrofit Architecture makes it possible to benefit from all aspects of connectivity and digitisation while respecting sustainability constraints: the recovery of old machines, the study of their parameters and the optimisation of working conditions allow social, economic and environmental sustainability. The article shows the architecture outline and an application case in the company PAMA S.p.A. in the context of the European AIDEAS project. In particular, in the case developed for PAMA, the application of the Smart Retrofit Architecture makes it possible to study the energy consumption of an old machine through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms.