Skip to main content
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary

Business Experiments in Cyber Physical Production Systems

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BEinCPPS (Business Experiments in Cyber Physical Production Systems)

Reporting period: 2017-05-01 to 2018-10-31

"CCyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are the next generation of engineered systems in which computing, communication, and control technologies are tightly integrated. The “cyber"" part of CPS is used to mainly focus on computing, such as embedded computers. However, with CPS covering an increasingly larger spatial area and unprecedented coordination among components within CPS, communication has become indispensable for CPS. The cyber characteristics of CPS are thus now from both its computing and communication subsystems. The “physical"" part of CPS refers to physical processes through which CPS interacts with its surroundings.

BEinCPPS Innovation Action aims to integrate and experiment a CPS-oriented Future Internet-based machine-factory-cloud digital platform firstly intensively in five selected Smart Specialization Strategy Vanguard regions (Lombardia in Italy, Euskadi in Spain, Baden Wuertemberg in Germany, Norte in Portugal, Rhone Alpes in France), afterwards extensively in many more European regions, by involving local competence centers and manufacturing SMEs, also via the mechanism of Open Calls. The final aim of this Innovation Action is to dramatically improve the adoption of CPPSs all over Europe by means of the creation, nurturing and flourishing of CPS-driven regional innovation ecosystems, made of competence centers, manufacturing enterprises and IT SMEs

The BEinCPPS Innovation Action has been the pioneer I4MS project focusing on Indsutry 4.0 (CPS). The BEinCPPS Reference Platform is now adopted in several other projects (H2020, National, Regional) and has strongly contributed to both “FIWARE for INDUSTRY” Foundation and “Into-CPS” Association value propositions to Manufacturing Industry. The BEinCPPS Ecosystem of Experiments, partly relying on regional champions, partly on open calls winners, is a collection of success stories influencing different Industry 4.0 related communities such as the Alliance for IoT Innovation, the Big Data Value Association and the Connected Factories cluster in the Factories of the Future. The BEinCPPS DIH methods and tools for SME-driven, pan-EU sustainable Regional Manufacturing DIHs has inspired the development of the DIHIWARE Innovation and Collaboration platform, which is currently under experimentation in 30+ EU regions, also thanks to the Vanguard Initiative.
"
BEinCPPS started with the identification of the CPSisation scenarios within the five champion pilot applications, then the technical partners have studied and analysed the IoT, Future Internet and Smart Systems domains to select the most suitable components for CPPS experimentation. The integrated federation of platforms has been developed, integrated and deployed into the five champions' sites.
Finally, the champions have performed assessment of the results and measured the success and business impact with specific performance indicators. Lessons learned for the implementation of CPPSs have been documented: based on the previous analysis, a formal technical assessment of the deployed prototypes has been performed with the participation of all the developers and the representatives of the five regional ecosystems. In this first iteration, following a methodology developed in the project, the five BEinCPPS regions have started the creation of their DIHs, while other ten more regions have been mentored and coached to develop their business and sustainable plan.

The second project iteration has followed the same pattern as the first one, with update of identified scenarios and requirements (and identification of new ones) analysis of the technical and business assessment performed at the end of the first iteration and definition of a new BEinCPPS open architecture completed with additional added value services, application needed to cover specific champion requirements.
Then a second cycle of development, integration and deployment has been completed to provide experiment execution and assessment. New lessons learnt have been devised in terms of user assessment of the experiments and of the IT artifacts deployed in each champion.

Project dissemination has been effectively and efficiently performed to reach up to all identified targets, such as industry, academia, public bodies, technological actors, with organization of and participation in high level international national and regional events, scientific publications, and especially ‘CPPS expansion’ events targeted specifically at industry and SMEs at regional level, events in which champions have been involved to deliver their success stories, explain the CPS-ization solution experimented and funding opportunities have been proposed.

BEinCPPS exploitable assets (Consultancy, IT and Experiments packages) are at the basis of more than 5 other projects at EU-National-Regional and are contributing to the Industry 4.0 strategy of the 5 BEinCPPS Regions. Commercial solutions originated by BEinCPPS are now on the market thanks to our SME ecosystem of both project beneficiaries and open call winners.
BEinCPPS integrates several ICT Open Platforms to offer leading-edge functions and services enabled by a smart & digital factory interconnected at three different levels fields, factory and cloud.
• Crystal reference platform meets the challenge to establish and push forward an interoperability specification and a reference technology platform as an European standard for filed devices and safety critical development (www.crystal-artemis.eu).
• IOT Open platforms developed under the Alliance of Internet of Things Innovation: cloud deployable, able to connect IoT elements (e.g sensors, smart tags, actuators) available across the factory (e.g. manufacturing plant, warehouses) (www.aioti.eu).
• FIWARE for industry provides an enhanced cloud environment plus a rich set of open standard APIs and open source components that enables to the full adoption of Industry 4.0 (www.fiware4industry.com)
The main impact of BEinCPPS is to impact the full value chain to SMEs and put all the necessary expertise and competencies at the SMEs’ disposal to create new innovative CPPS products and applications for the manufacturing domain. This will be achieved thanks to the use of existing ecosystems organized as networking partners, competence partners, industrial advance manufacturing infrastructure partners and platforms partners to act as a gateway to provide end-to-end services to design, engineering and experimentation of innovative CPPS products and applications in manufacturing. The main long-term outcome is the creation of a competitive advantage in terms of a development cost and time reduction and better positioned market offer for European SMEs of their CPPS applications. This should increase both the richness in offer of CPPS applications by European SMEs and the number of CPPS enabled advanced manufacturing processes in Europe.

The notion of BEinCPPS Reference Platform has started a very intense debate about alignment of reference architectures (e.g. FIWARE, Industrial Data Space, Industrial Internet Consortium) and open source Reference Implementations which is currently involving the FoF-11 projects and the newly funded DT-ICT-07 Digital Manufacturing Platforms. BEinCPPS is the demonstration that “B2B Platforms” is a battle that Europe can win, thanks to open source implementations, regional innovation ecosystems and certified Digital Transformation best practices.
Flyer p. 5
Flyer p. 1
Flyer p. 7
Flyer p. 6
Flyer p.3
Flyer p. 8
Flyer p. 4
Flyer p.2