HawkSpex^® Flow

HawkSpex^® Flow is a service with which soft sensor systems can be  automated and efficiently developed and validated. This development tool is available for every level of proof of concept from systematic feasibility studies and prototypes down to integration. It can be used flexibly in your business’s own, a commercial provider’s or the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s infrastructure.

The hardware sensors are used to collect a representative quantity of reference data to develop a soft sensor system. Scan trials can run for several years, a growing data set being organized and configured all the while. What is more, several steps are necessary to calibrate and preprocess the collected data, which can be configured in complex workflows with HawkSpex^® Flow. Our workflow system’s method modules divided by subject enable us to develop and configure template solutions for recurring use cases.

A higher level of automation is required to deal with a soft sensor problem efficiently. Machine learning applies already compiled template solutions to large quantities of data or modeling. The goal is fully automated numerical data processing during which complex dependencies within a workflow can be specified. Necessary manual steps, such as the manipulation of segmentation labels in image data, can be added during the workflow. This enables users to complete every automatic step necessary for every data set concurrently and then concentrate on the manual work on all data sets as a whole.

The Biosystems Engineering Business Unit maps every development process for the widest variety of tasks in soft sensor development in its HawkSpex^® Flow-System. This translates into a high level of reusability and a wide methodological range. We are now able to make this range of functions available to our clients to as a separate software or cloud service. HawkSpex^® Flow enables us to provide complex automated services following the principle of “soft-sensors on demand” and integrate them in our clients’ products and services.

The HawkSpex^® Flow system can be seamlessly integrated into high-performance computing (HPC) resources. The heavy computing load during the development of soft sensors can thus be distributed and scaled. This makes major modeling and analysis projects possible in the first place. We also collaborate closely with leading commercial HPC partners. They enable us to provide our methodology with the computing support needed to solve problems of any magnitude for our clients efficiently and quickly.