The project has achieved most of the goals planned for the 1st Periodic Report (first 24 months), regarding research and networking activities. The consortium has achieved relevant scientific contributions, created new collaborations and enhanced existing ones, and proposed and implemented well-attended training and networking activities. Most of the tasks have advanced or been completed as expected, and deliverables have been submitted and approved. However, the secondments implementation has important deviations with respect to the secondment plan included in the proposal. We highlight some publications which represent concrete scientific achievements.
In this first period a large part of the work has focussed on identifying and reviewing existing approaches relevant to the project as well as identifying requirements and possible approaches. As such we made a study of approaches to collaborative business process verification supporting working packages 1, 2 and 4. In addition we studied design-time and run-time verification of processes in relation to compliance with business and governmental rules.
In relation to interoperability we analysed the requirements for, and main challenges that must be addressed to support an integrated and scalable factory architecture. An architecture that is characterized by access to services, aggregation of data, and orchestration of production processes. Based upon this an architectural framework was developed.
To address the challenge of process composition and asset discovery we have looked at the usage of semantic search technologies to facilitate discovery. A user-aware, semantic, enterprise search engine solution was proposed that forms the basis of further work in relation to working package 3.
In summary, the first reporting period has led to outcomes in terms of foundational notions being established, requirements being clear. In addition new approaches, and prototypes, were developed for evaluation and enhancement in the context of the first project.
