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Digital twins bringing agility and innovation to manufacturing SMEs, by empowering a network of DIHs with an integrated digital platform that enables Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS)

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DIGITbrain (Digital twins bringing agility and innovation to manufacturing SMEs, by empowering a network of DIHs with an integrated digital platform that enables Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS))

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

The manufacturing industry is constantly evolving; customers have new requirements and want more personalisation; interoperability with new products and technologies is expected; regulations and norms are becoming stricter; the environment calls for more protection; the aging of the workforce jeopardises the collective know-how. These aspects cause increasing pressure that the manufacturing industry needs to address. Especially manufacturing SMEs are challenged because of the limited resources and the difficulty in accessing digital technologies and advanced manufacturing hardware tailored to their needs.
Digital Twins are a way to answer these challenges. However, implementing Digital Twins is yet another challenge for many manufacturing SMEs since it requires a lot of expertise and a holistic approach ranging from the manufacturing machines to become data resources, to data-driven and/or physically-based modelling, to mastering data lakes and compute resources such as HPC, Cloud and Edge Computing.
The DIGITbrain (Db) project aims to enable customised industrial products and to facilitate cost-effective distributed and localised production for manufacturing SMEs, by means of leveraging Edge-, Cloud- and HPC-based modelling, simulation, optimisation, analytics, and machine learning tools and by means of augmenting the concept of digital twin with a memorising capacity (Digital Brain) towards:
a) Recording the provenance and boosting the cognition of the industrial product over its full lifecycle, and
b) Empowering the network of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) to implement the smart Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) business model.
DIGITbrain is progressing according to the plan toward achieving the six main project objectives:
1) Implement the Digital Brain concept by configuring and orchestrating Data/Models/Algorithms (DMA), and Resources: Almost all concepts have been implemented. Conditions and Messages need to be fully integrated and tested. The first 3 phases of the DMA life cycle have been covered.
2) Extend the CloudiFacturing platform by integrating the new execution engine and FIWARE industrial platform: The co-simulation engine has been integrated as a micro-service. The sensors were integrated via FIWARE, and the support for Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) is under development.
3) Develop the MaaS business model by empowering DIHs to become brokers of manufacturing capacity: The use case framework has been defined. Machine services have been collected and mapped. Interest from several SMEs in the MaaS service has been received.
4) Augment the capabilities of the marketplace by integrating the Digital Brain concept and MaaS business model: The Digital Agora supports DIGITbrain (Db) Assets & Digital Product Brain Entities, as well as price models for Db Assets. The enterprise resources area is under development for Industrial Product Instances and MaaS functionality.
5) Conduct three waves of experiments to validate the project results: 1 internal and 2 Open Calls: 1st and 2nd open calls were successfully launched with 64 proposals received. Each open call has funded seven experiments.
The 1st and 2nd waves of experiments have been conducted and all their phases (design, implementation, and integration into the Db testbed) concluded. The third-wave experiments (2nd open call) are in progress.
6) Evangelise the manufacturing community by showing the approach and benefits of Db technology and MaaS, and attracting new adopters: Workshops, training, and webinars have been organised. DIGITbrain has had an active participation in events and social media presence. Moreover, 17 scientific papers have been published.
The business model consultancy has supported first-wave experiments. The experiment results are contributing additional assets to the Db Digital Agora. Furthermore, information from the experiments was collected and analysed. The Value Proposition Canvas for each target customer identified (DIHs, ISVs, SMEs) was implemented. The experiment results are contributing additional assets to the Db Digital Agora. Further investigation on the economic flows generated both by the Db Solution and the MaaS implementation has been executed. The DIGITbrain business model is refined and adjusted as the project progresses.
The DIGITbrain approach will fuse the physical and digital dimensions during the whole industrial product lifecycle, making use of advanced data collection and analysis techniques, including models, algorithms, and resources to empower manufacturing providers with an adaptive capacity to optimise the behaviour and performance of the instances of industrial products, by considering the individual context and operating conditions, enabling manufacturing providers to offer their solutions as a service, guaranteeing optimal operation and workload.
The participation of DIHs facilitates widespread coverage to engage the manufacturing community, thus, boosting the adoption of the Db Solution. DIGITbrain will transform the CloudiFacturing Solution and ecosystem towards the requirements of MaaS, utilising the Digital Brain and its underlying technology components as the project’s main innovation.
DIGITbrain realises an ambitious technological vision by developing the Digital Brain concept and its enabling technologies. It assures that these technological advances are taken up by a critical mass in the manufacturing sector, especially by SMEs and mid-caps, resulting in the smart business model MaaS, facilitated by a network of interconnected DIHs.
DIGITbrain unleashes novel and smart business models by combining two main innovations: the Digital Brain concept in which the whole lifecycle of an Industrial Product, both from a physical and a digital perspective, is captured, and the creation of local efficient value networks by matching supply and demand of advanced manufacturing technologies.
DIGITbrain will benefit not only manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps, but also technology providers, DIHs, and in general, the EU population that will benefit from advanced manufacturing solutions. Moreover, it will contribute to improving the EU manufacturing performance, reducing delivery times and thus customer satisfaction, while better control of manufacturing processes and the efficient use of resources will foster sustainable design and more eco-friendly Industrial Products.
Finally, the implementation of the ambitious and ground-breaking Db concept is generating breakthrough knowledge, resulting in 17 scientific publications so far.
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