DATA SPACES FOR FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION LINES AND SUPPLY CHAINS FOR RESILIENT MANUFACTURING

Project Information

FLEX4RES

Grant agreement ID: 101091903

DOI

10.3030/101091903

Project closed

EC signature date 18 November 2022

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• Digital, Industry and Space

Total cost

€ 10 089 581,25

EU contribution

€ 8 078 631,00

Coordinated by

PANEPISTIMIO PATRON
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FLEX4RES (DATA SPACES FOR FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION LINES AND SUPPLY CHAINS FOR RESILIENT MANUFACTURING)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Manufacturing industries continuously face the challenge of delivering high-quality products under high production rates while minimizing non value-adding activities. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is causing manufacturers to rethink and reassess their global supply chains and the flexibility of their production sites. Resilience means the ability to withstand difficult situations, while flexibility can be considered as the ability to accommodate changes without incurring significant extra costs. Production processes demanding high human skill such as forming processes, requires readjustment of the process parameters of all production steps as a new product evolves. The deficiencies can be attributed largely to the lack of efficient ways for trusted data sharing among the stakeholders without interoperability barriers. There is a need to be able to determine when such changes lead to deterministic-chaotic behavior with far reaching consequences. FLEX4RES provides an open platform to support production networks' reconfiguration for resilient manufacturing value chains. FLEX4RES will utilize platform-based manufacturing that builds on the state-of-the-art Gaia-X and IDS technologies for data-sharing in the horizontal supply chain and the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) that is to implement intra-factory reconfiguration practices. FLEX4RES considers the Digital Twin of the value-adding network a key enabling technology to achieve reconfiguration processes in highly flexible production systems and networks. The developed platform aim to improve the existing industry-established lean management approaches related to Reconfiguration Management through the digitalization of the production, characterized as Industry4.0 by allowing for the information sharing between value chain stakeholders.

The project has defined the following objectives:
- Open Platform Implementation: Develop an open platform based on Gaia-X and International Data Spaces (IDS) technologies for secure, sovereign data exchange across the supply chain.
- Resilience Assessment: Create a toolbox for early detection of reconfiguration needs, enabling manufacturers to assess and improve the resilience of their processes.
- Decision-Making Tools: Develop tools to help manufacturers evaluate and apply reconfiguration strategies, including analyzing 'what-if' scenarios and facilitating automated adjustments.
- Pilot Testing: Test and validate the integrated solution in industrial pilot cases to ensure practical applicability and effectiveness.

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

Over the first 18 months of the project, initial achievements in both the technical and scientific parts of the project have been accompished as follows.

FLEX4RES Architecture
The FLEX4RES platform includes key technologies such as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), Digital twins, and Data space concept (Gaia-X and International Data Spaces). The Digital Twin concept is implemented using the Asset Administration Shells. The goal was to successfully integrate these technologies, ensuring they work well together across different manufacturing environments, by taking into consideration requirements from the use cases and the pre-pilot cases.

Resilience Assessment Toolbox
The Resilience Assessment toolbox aims to provide tools that will assess resilience at different levels — macro, meso and micro levels. Different tools have been designed using different methodologies. Some methodologies that are used are: 1) Penalty of Change, 2) Severity of Failure, 3) Value Stream method , and 4) Bayesian Networks.

Reconfiguration Strategies Toolbox
The reconfiguration strategies toolbox aims to provide a set of reconfiguration tools to support manufacturers quickly adapt to changes by providing plans for reconfiguring production lines, supply chains, or even entire factories. The tools were designed to work seamlessly with the resilience assessment outputs, ensuring that any necessary reconfiguration is both timely and effective.

Pilot Testing and Validation
Finally, pre pilot cases have been designed and integration is in progress to USI, IFT, LMS, PTW and IDE facilities. The goal is to have some first results, by setting up the infrastructure and validating the resilience assessment and reconfiguration strategies tools.

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 project has identified, so far, five (5) Key Expoitable Results that go beynd the state of art as follows:

1. Data spaces framework connecting AAS middleware systems for sharing manufacturing information among industrial entities.
The AAS middleware facilitates seamless data exchange between disparate systems, eliminating the frustration of data silos and interoperability issues. The industrial data space framework provides a standardised platform, reducing the risk of compatibility issues and operational disruptions. Connectors enable effortless integration with existing systems, eliminating the obstacle of manual data transfer and reducing the risk of errors and inefficiencies. The future product solves the problem of fragmented data silos in industries and satisfies the need for seamless data integration and collaboration among businesses for enhanced efficiency and innovation.

2. Resilience assessment toolbox
A structured federated and distributed catalogue for resilience services and a set of defined tools to strengthen the resilience capability and resiliency assessment from a shopfloor to a supply chain level. This toolbox could contain several tools to assess the resilience on different hierarchical levels, i.e. supply chain, shopfloor and machine level, to increase the resilience and planning efficiency. The solution supports the users to mitigate risks of unpredicted events and unexpected deviations which cause problems by identifying issues in the whole supply chain and giving more information about the consequences of this risk such as costs of not mitigating it.

3. Inefficiency monitoring and auto diagnostic cycles for maintenance flexibility
Functionalities for early detection of possible problems at machine or process level. They are based on the collection of machine data via sensors. This data is analysed in what is called the machine fingerprint and process fingerprint and reports are generated to warn users of possible problems in production and allow rapid decision making. The global solution monitors and identifies inefficiencies in production, leading to higher efficiency and providing a more structured view of overall production health.

4. Resilient production planner based on real-time data monitoring of machine status and production execution
Optimised production planner for flexibility that can dynamically handle unplanned stoppages and events. Unlike current market solutions, the planner will integrate real-time asset condition and process data, as well as aggregated data, enabling the production manager to identify work and orders that are not properly sized and to plan realistically based on that information.

5. Optimised reconfiguration of value chains
The software allows manufacturers to plan their production network for the mid/long term, considering market demand and supply chain fluctuations. The software enables users to approximate optimum planning decisions in a highly volatile and uncertain environment and a holistic framework which incorporates variabilities in logistics, production operation and capacity, inventory, transportations, supply chain and market demand.

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