DISRUPT has achieved its ambitious goals through the work that is being conducted in this second period. The impact of the project to both the Factories of the Future strategic objectives for digital automation and the trends in the target industries is high and includes the following:
• To achieve increased efficiency of production units and reduced down-time due to malfunctions through the adoption of a modular, decentralised CPS structure, empowered with complex event processing, simulation and optimisation tools as well as the ability to self-adjust;
• To be able to adjust to rapidly changing market needs and unexpected events through advanced capability for agile manufacturing processes, based on hybrid architectures;
• To effectively integrate cyber-physical operations, advanced analytics and decision support tools with the organisation's Enterprise Information Systems towards disrupting the traditional automation pyramid;
• To foster ecosystem-wide collaboration between developers and machine providers so that they address specific manufacturing business cases by offering ready-to-deploy solutions;
• To deliver an interoperable reference platform for more effective coordination of the manufacturing chains;
• To reach increased productivity through the broad use of ICT tools combining modelling, design, optimisation and simulation for day-to-day operations and strategic planning;
• To achieve improved resource consumption profile for processes and products arising from resource-aware optimisation, situational awareness enabled by IoT and CPS and co-simulation allowing more proactive product and process design or ramp-up;
• To advance the knowledge gained from processes and products and communicated in real-time from the plant floor to any management level through interoperable advanced analytics and the integration with ICT tools;
• To exploit big data technologies and modern cloud-based architectures to increase the efficiency of ICT tools and services in future smart manufacturing applications.
Productivity is enhanced in terms of (i) fast reaction to unexpected market changes, (ii) minimisation of differences between the final production and the actual market needs, (iii) efficient production scheduling and planning and (iv) effective (self-) adjustment to unexpected events.
The DISRUPT system enables resource optimisation and minimisation of reaction time and thus lead to a more efficient production line, as per the main economic trends of manufacturing , i.e. (i) the economics of production, related to technologies such as additive manufacturing that make it possible to cost-effectively manufacture products more quickly, in smaller batches and (ii) the economics of the value chain, related to digital technologies that are narrowing the distance between manufacturer and consumer, allowing manufacturers to bypass traditional intermediaries.
DISRUPT has achieved an adaptable system that enables reconfiguration of processes and production units, with the introduction of the appropriate semantics and modelling schemes that ensure interoperability and facilitate interaction. With these functionalities, the DISRUPT platform has significant impact to the time-to-market factor for industries, as this approach minimises the delays not only in the two investigated use cases (home appliances and car manufacturing) but in any other field where DISRUPT can be applied, and thus minimise the economic consequences of these delays.
The business case developped by one of the key DISRUPT partners (CRF) indicates that the approach demonstrated by DISRUPT and applied on a single plant can lead to a mean savings over the next 5 years after industrialisation of nearly 900k€, with a RoI under 2 years.