UTILIZING IOT-SYSTEMS FOR DECENTRALIZED PRODUCTION CONTROL AND OFFERING SURPLUS PRODUCTION CAPACITIES ON A PRODUCTION PLATFORM

Project Information

assemblean

Grant agreement ID: 101071868

DOI

10.3030/101071868

Project closed

EC signature date 31 May 2022

Start date 1 June 2022

End date 30 November 2022

Funded under

• European innovation ecosystems

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 75 000,00

Coordinated by

ASSEMBLEAN GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - assemblean (UTILIZING IOT-SYSTEMS FOR DECENTRALIZED PRODUCTION CONTROL AND OFFERING SURPLUS PRODUCTION CAPACITIES ON A PRODUCTION PLATFORM)

Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2022-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

assemblean is an automation and production technology company emerging from years of research in the field of decentralized production control. Xiaojun Yang and Alexander Pöhler investigated the question of how to increase the utilization of production
facilities. It became apparent that many production capacities remain unused. During this research at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the university of Paderborn, we developed a decentralized production control system, with which existing production systems can be equipped. These control systems then communicate with each other in order to subsequently take over production control automatically. This leads to significant improvements in production processes. In addition, the production control systems identify
free capacities automatically. assemblean wants to use these capacities and make them available to other companies. For this purpose, a Production-as-a-Service platform has been developed. In order to use the platform as intended a connection between the control system and the platform needed to be established and a lot of obstacles concerning the business model and organizational requirements needed to be solved.
This project served mostly for the concretization of the business model in order to develop concepts for contracts and in general for finding a solution for pricing respectively offering production services. It shall be a first step to an actual production as a service platform, which not only includes the manufacturing of parts with certain production processes, but also modules and complete products including assembly and quality control.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We worked on the dPCS and the production platform during this project to improve their functionality. The funding however was mostly used to escape day-to-day-business and think about the bigger picture and develop a concept for the future development of the production control system and offer production as a service.
The aim of improving production control was to be able to handle more complex production control projects and to simplify implementation tasks. In addition, the integration in existing IoT platforms was advanced. We thereby developed a working prototype for one of our pilot customers.
For the production platform we developed a new, better version with a lot more functionality. Solutions for contracting, easier communication and the generation and upload of products and their composition was made easier.
The main achievement was the revision and concretization of our business model with a combination of production as a service and production control. We now have a more clear vision of the tasks that need to be done in order to develop a working prototype, through which production as a service can be automatically offered.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The implementation of our approach of production control is new in the industry. Also production as a service for modules and even products is not offered by other companies at the moment. Therefore both parts of our business idea are beyond the state of the art.
For this project we focused on improving the business model of both and combing them as a complementary product. Especially for the production platform there are a lot of obstacles that need to be overcome. One major technical issue is that we need to empower the producer to be able to produce modules and parts according to the all relevant data and requirements. We thereby made some progress especially for CNC-applications and assembly. Regarding organizational requirements we found a pricing strategy for most production processes and developed algorithms accordingly.