A KPI-based Condition Monitoring System for the Beer Brewing Process

The process of beer brewing is very complex as it has to fulfill strict demands on the product quality as well as on the availability and the performance of the plant. As a consequence, a condition monitoring of the beer brewing process and its visualization plays an important role such that all relevant deviations are detected as early as possible by the production manager. While a general process for condition monitoring already exists, there currently exists no approach to realize this process for the domain of beer brewing. Therefore, this paper presents a condition monitoring system for the beer brewing process developed in an industrial project. This condition monitoring system is based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that support the production manager in evaluating the actual state of the production processes. A set of brewery-specific KPIs are determined and discussed in the paper. In addition, software architecture and visualization of the KPIs in a brewery-specific dashboard are presented. We evaluate our concept at various beer breweries and report about lessons that we have learned.