Requirements of modern production processes stress the need of greater agility and flexibility leading to faster production cycles, increased productivity, less waste and more sustainable production. At the factory level, decisions need to be supported by detailed knowledge about the production process and its interplay with external entities. Unfortunately, historical and live data that generates this knowledge is becoming more and more distributed and few solutions are available that can easily tackle the implied challenges. Moreover, factories are becoming less isolated in the productive web of nations and several suppliers and third party service providers need to be contacted and coordinated to implement decisions taken at the factory level.
In such a worldwide and dynamic environment, the ability of automatizing the preliminary coordination and negotiation activities involved in setting up supply chains for specific needs, in an open marketplace-like fashion, could greatly improve the ability of factories to react on external challenges and driving forces quickly.
COMPOSITION has two main goals: The first goal is to integrate data along the value chain inside a factory into one integrated information management system (IIMS) combining physical world, simulation, planning and forecasting data to enhance re-configurability, scalability and optimisation of resources and processes inside the factory. The second goal is to create a (semi-)automatic ecosystem, which extends the local IIMS concept to a holistic and collaborative system incorporating and inter-linking both the Supply and the Value Chains.
As results, the COMPOSITION IIMS is deployed at three pilot sites for doing predictive maintenance of an oven and a polishing machine, component tracking, visual analytics and intra-factory waste collection route optimization. This incorporated sensor development and deployment for data collection and completion as well as their integration together with existing shopfloor data into an IIMS, development of data management and data analytics procedures, brokerage, factory modelling, simulation and forecasting mechanisms and finally the design and development of different GUIs.
The COMPOSITION intra-factory results are deployed in an agent-based marketplace that allows to semi-automatically negotiate about goods and services of a requestor with the benefit that every entity can step into the bidding process. As such, new business connections can be established. As a second use case of the COMPOSITION ecosystem, ELDIA is able to live monitor container fill-levels off-site for optimized pick-up management. These systems incorporate sensor development, deployment and integration, brokerage, agent and marketplace development including matchmaking as well as GUI design and development.
