European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing

Project Information

EFPF

Grant agreement ID: 825075

DOI

10.3030/825075

Project closed

EC signature date 3 December 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 16 245 127,63

EU contribution

€ 13 640 264,01

Coordinated by

INSTITUTO TECNOLOGICO METALMECANICO, MUEBLE, MADERA, EMBALAJE Y AFINES-AIDIMME
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EFPF (European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing)

Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

EFPF is a smart factory ecosystem that interlinks 4 smart factory platforms through a standard and open interoperability mechanism: the Data Spine. The Data Spine establishes a federation layer enableing the manufacturing and supply chain companies to coordinate existing functionalities and address the fragmentation of solutions available through different providers and platforms. It helps to remove the barriers to innovation found in novel service creation and validation due to the issues concerning seamless access, privacy & interoperability of dispersed infrastructure, tools & systems. The federated platform, resulting from the interlinking of existing smart factory platforms and solutions, provides opportunities for open innovation, agile collaborations & new service creation. It delivers societal and economic value creating new jobs and start-ups in the digital manufacturing space, enhancing digital skill levels and safer environment giving better economic conditions, opportunities for new business activities & more stakeholders' engagement.
These are the objectives:
•Form a technology platform for cross-organisational and cross-sectorial integration with embedded intelligence and embodied tools and services to create an industrial ecosystem in Europe.
•To enable SMEs to develop and/or integrate different technologies, unlock their data value, deploy complementary applications, and better react to changing value-chains.
•Extensible Marketplace Framework to interlink tool and App stores through intelligent service discovery, matchmaking & recommendation mechanisms.
•Ecosystem creation through piloting and large-scale experimentation, including financial and technical support for the creation and experimentation of agile value networks.
•Realisation of scenarios for the extensions, maintenance and sustainability of federated platform and its ecosystem
•Develop a comprehensive adoption strategy to attract companies to the ecosystem.

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

EFPF early completed the architecture definition to soon initiate the technical activities. The architecture was complemented with requirements and implementation of interoperation challenges and scenarios in which the diverse solutions can be interlinked and used in real-world. The lessons learned gave the impetus for developing the architecture of the federation layer (Data Spine - DS) and other federation services in the platform.The technical developments were initiated and guided by an agile methodology supported by relevant systems (JIRA, GitLab).
The core DS functionality was implemented through open-source technology. A set of federation services were developed to take advantage of the interconnectivity enabled by the DS, to provide key functionalities in the platform (a public Portal to access the federated solution, federated search to find partners, products and solutions in the federation, business and network intelligence service to analyse the trends and patterns of user interactions and transactions in the federated platform). Iterations were carried out to enhance the functionalities & usability aspects of the federation services.
The development of a federated marketplace mechanism that interlinked the existing marketplaces of the different platforms through the DS provided a unified interface to enable user access to the distributed offerings (products and services) from multiple marketplaces. The federated marketplace interlinked 4 marketplaces from previous EU projects and was followed by a marketplace from Austrian Standards International. Discussions with EU project Shop4CF is ongoing to expand the marketplace after the project. An Accountancy Service was implemented to track the user across different marketplaces and generate revenue for the EFPF platform operator (European Factory Foundation or EFF) based on the commission-based model: the user is directed from the EFPF platform to the federated marketplace. The service provides dashboard for the operator and generates invoices for federated marketplace owners.
To support the pilot activities, digital manufacturing tools & services were implemented both within the platform and at the pilot facilities. The solutions were validated and found useful and the reusability potential was recognised for sustainable use beyond the piloting phase. Based on this success, the project opened a call and 20 experiments carried out a variety of activities (validating EFPF solutions in industrial scenarios, creating services and integrating 3rd party services and platforms in the federation). The outcomes were integrated in the EFPF platform and its enhancements ensured the platform serves for different types of users. An event where all experiments presented their outcomes was also celebrated.
The EFF was established to manage the platform ownership and sustainability. This non-profit Austrian association, composed of 12 founding members, promotes and exploits the EFPF platform beyond EFPF. The EFF has established governance mechanisms to manage the platform and member activities.
EFPF website includes the key value propositions and pilot scenarios, blog posts & videos on project activities & platform offerings. Updates were carried out on different social media. Detailed exploitation plans at project and partner levels were performed and workshops organised to clarify the IPR issues raised. EFPF established the Digital Manufacturing Platform cluster with similar projects and organised joint events to promote the offerings of the EU projects in the digital manufacturing domain.

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)

EFPF has implemented and demonstrated the connectivity of architectural aspects of different digital manufacturing platforms and how cross-platform business processes can be orchestrated to take advantage of distributed offerings. The interoperable Data Spine has been validated establishing the federated platform and connecting heterogeneous systems.
EFPF enhanced the agility of the value networks in the manufacturing domain by providing tools for process optimization, intelligence and data sharing and process orchestration. Pilot and open call implementations of relevant solutions are available through the EFPF Portal.
It also provided support for agile supply chain creation and management through innovative solutions, available through the EFPF Portal, that provides access to the EFPF Marketplace where the offerings from multiple marketplaces can be accessed through a unified one-stop-shop interface. Agent-based search and negotiation techniques are developed and integrated in the marketplace to support automatic negotiations over different business contracts.
Other advancements were made in the area of real time shop-floor gathering through factory connectors, real-time and historic data analysis through a variety of analytic solutions and secure and trustworthy data exchange through block chain, cyber security risk assessment in integrated systems and secure data storage through the use of containerised technology.
A matchmaking functionality, which is realised through a federated search mechanism, was also deployed, allowing EFPF platform users' to find partners, products & services within the federation. EFPF also developed detailed technical document & tutorials covering the basics of technological developments, usage aspects and enhancement potential of the solutions developed in the project.All is available through the EFF Portal https://portal.ef-foundation.com

Overview of EFPF Federated Value Propositions