A Multi-Sided Business Platform for Plug and Produce Industrial Product Service Systems

Project Information

MARKET4.0

Grant agreement ID: 822064

DOI

10.3030/822064

Project closed

EC signature date 1 October 2018

Start date 1 November 2018

End date 30 April 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Advanced manufacturing and processing

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 7 500 000,00

Coordinated by

NETCOMPANY SA
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - MARKET4.0 (A Multi-Sided Business Platform for Plug and Produce Industrial Product Service Systems)

Reporting period: 2021-11-01 to 2022-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

MARKET4.0 develops an open multi-sided digital platform for enabling production equipment and service providers to connect and work together with manufacturing companies. Creates technical and financial trust to prove payment, delivery and anonymized feedback in manufacturing B2B collaboration.

The objective of MARKET4.0 is to define, develop and validate an open multi-sided marketplace, based on a trusted P2P data sharing infrastructure for Industry 4.0 that brings together Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPSS) providers (supply side) and customers (demand-side) and that allows direct interaction among the different sides in order to improve the sales power of production equipment SMEs. MARKET4.0 will offer advanced web-presence of production equipment SMEs extended with additional functionalities such as simulations, VR/AR capabilities and also will be a P2P Industrial Data Space that offer smart user-services, a secure API to try and test the Digital Twin of the production equipment, on top suppliers’ and customers’ data that enable the direct transaction between market peers (supplier-to supplier, supplier-to-customer, customer-to-suppliers and more) during the whole B2B phases from equipment search to procurement and commissioning. MARKET4.0 will create trust in the business transaction between the SME production equipment manufacturer and the customer, as indicated in the Industrial Data Space (IDS) reference architecture. That also implies technical trust: simulation before purchasing and financial trust with Blockchain distributed ledger technology to prove payment, delivery, and anonymized feedback. In MARKET4.0 the supply side, mainly SMEs, may offer a) production equipment, b) services that extend the capabilities of the production equipment, c) production equipment as a service and d) collaborative engineering services. The demand side includes industrial stakeholders such as OEMs and production system integrators that provide engineering services and act as mediators between production equipment suppliers and OEMs.

MARKET4.0 will disrupt the manufacturing sector by providing a multi-sided digital platform enabling equipment manufacturers to work with their customers, strengthening their value proposition and thereby increasing their competitive position.

In MARKET4.0 initially three (3) production equipment marketplaces are connected:

1. Metal Processing (such as metal cutting machines)
2. Plastics and composites processing (such as injection molding)
3. High-tech production equipment (such as equipment for electronics manufacturing)

The production equipment marketplaces are expanded through the project Open Calls. There were fourteen (14) selected and funded Open Call #1 experiments, which were implemented during the period 1st November 2020 - 31st October 2021, while Open Call #2 covered the implementation of eleven (11) experiments during the period 1st April 2021 – 31st March 2022.

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

The work performed in MARKET4.0 from the beginning to the end of the project (M1-M42) is summarized below:
• The MARKET4.0 user and technical requirements have been captured, an IDS-based reference architecture, which specifies the role of each component in the MARKET4.0 platform, as well as the exchange of information between different components, has been designed, the MARKET4.0 Business Model and Governance Structure have been investigated and the MARKET4.0 data management plan has been defined (WP1).
• The first and second versions of the MARKET4.0 platform core components have been developed (WP2 and WP3).
• Three innovative MARKET4.0 Marketplaces that leverage the MARKET4.0 reference architecture have been designed and the solutions from the domains of Metal Processing (WP4, WP7), Plastics Processing (WP5, WP8) and High-Tech Production Equipment (WP6, WP9) have been integrated into the MARKET4.0 core platform. A number of experiments were performed in order to benchmark the MARKET4.0 platform within the three aforementioned domains (WP11, WP12 and WP13). Improved versions of the three MARKET4.0 Marketplaces have been provided, taking into account and responding to the needs of the services providers connecting to the MARKET4.0 Marketplaces through the Open Call experiments (WP15, WP16 and WP17).
• A common framework for conducting experiments, providing a common set of KPIs and benchmarks in order to evaluate the success of the MARKET4.0 platform adoption among the three project domains and the application experiments, has been defined (WP10).
• The project’s Open Calls (#1 and #2) for new experiments to connect with the MARKET4.0 platform have been completed and all selected and funded Open Call experiments have been successfully implemented. All necessary procedures to provide (technical and administrative) support to, as well as monitor and evaluate the progress of the Open Call experiments have been established and applied and technical improvements of the MARKET4.0 platform have been carried out to support the work of the Open Call experiments (WP14 and WP18).
• The final version of the dissemination & communication activities report of the project has been released and a number of actions for disseminating the project concept, developments, and findings to key actors in the field, have been conducted. In addition, activities related to the dissemination and training action plan of the project have been designed and carried out (WP19).
• The final round of the MARKET4.0 Exploitation Strategy has been finalized and integrated and the related results have been reported in the final version of the exploitation, standardization and business plan report of the project (WP20).
• The “ethics requirements” that the project must comply with, have been set out (WP22).

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)

MARKET4.0 aimed to create an environment, where business can exchange data securely and engage into B2B transactions. Therefore, security, privacy and trust along with data sharing facilitation were of paramount importance. MARKET4.0 in the process of elaborating its platform architecture sought to comply with and implement the features of existing reference architectures for data processing, including the Big Data Value Reference Model (BDVA2017), the Oracle Big Data & Analytics Reference Architecture (Oracle 2013), and NIST Big Data Interoperability Framework (NIST 2015). In parallel, the work in specifying the MARKET4.0 architecture investigated the possibility of incorporating elements from existing platforms in the domain, such as FIWARE (see https://www.fiware.org/) Big Data Europe (see https://www.big-data-europe.eu/) and outcomes of EU-funded research projects, such as SmartOpenData (SmartOpenData Consortium 2014). A second important aspect of the work on specifying the MARKET4.0 architecture was security. Therefore, mechanisms and approaches from reference architectures such as the Information Sharing Environment Data Integration reference architecture (Information Sharing Environment 2014), the Oracle Security in Depth Reference Architecture (Oracle 2013), and NIST Cloud Computing Security Reference Architecture (NIST 2013) were investigated and incorporated based on the needs of the MARKET4.0 platform. The MARKET4.0 partners also sought to contribute to the initiatives around Europe working on relevant frameworks and architectures, such as BDVA, based on the activities and outcomes of the work on realizing the MARKET4.0 architecture.

MARKET4.0 concept