Higher agility for the European Manufacturing Industry is the main MOTIVATION for the openMOS project. While automated systems are appealing to achieve high productivity and quality requirements, their sensitivity to change is becoming increasingly a bottleneck to substantial reduction of lot sizes and more frequent change-overs. The project VISION is to enable full economic sustainability of the production systems based on intelligent modular plug-and-produce equipment. To achieve this, it is focusing on three main innovation strands: 1) embedding plug-and-produce capabilities into automation devices, robots and machines, 2) enabling vertical and horizontal connectivity between plug-and-produce automation components and higher level control and business functions, and 3) creating a easily extendable and adaptable manufacturing operating system (MOS) that permits the easy introduction of new products, work orders and changes in the equipment and allows easy deployment of optimisation and changeover management strategies. The targeted INNOVATION is a common, openly accessible plug-and-produce system platform which allows all stakeholders in the automation system value chain to come together and jointly develop and exploit solutions. Therefore, the project is proposing to integrate well established plug-and-produce system concepts from many years of research in this field, into industrial-relevant technology platforms which have emerged in recent years. As the vast majority of components/ devices/ machine manufacturers and system integrators are SMEs, plug-and-produce can only be achieved by placing specific SME requirements at the forefront: solutions by, and for, SMEs. The RTD approach will be driven by proposed industrial scenarios and pilot implementations which will be carried out to systematically test and validate the readiness of the targeted exploitable results in three key industrial sectors (white goods, automotive and electronics).

The AVANGARD project addresses the integration of three novel processing units into an existing Microfactory test bed conceived to produce urban electric vehicles. The units are state of-the-art multipurpose and multifunctional demonstrators on their own, specifically: Robotized integration of laser cutting-shaping-welding for 3D components Supersonic deposition of metallic powders for high speed 3D printing Large volume and high-speed 3D polymeric printing The operation of the AVANGARD pilot will be demonstrated manufacturing I-Bikes, I-CARS and innovative battery packs. The proposed innovations target urban mobility where we are entering an era of rapid transformation and disruption which are also challenging traditional paradigms on manufacturing and business models characterized by an unprecedented speed, scale and scope of technological change. The project will prepare the environment for novel forms of collaborative distributed manufacturing amongst different EU regions. Innovative value chains will be pursued to overcome the scale (giga) and speed being established in planned economies (China) with market development controlled by the governments attitudes, targets and policy tools. To manage the IPRs and the supply chain, AVANGARD will implement a hybrid public-private Blockchain platform where the public chain increases security through distributed consensus and validation and the private sidechain increases speed while keeping sensible data stored in the facilities of partners. The platform will allow auditability of sources, traceability, verification of sources, still with private control of documentation and compliance to data retention policies. The theme of Blockchain-powered manufacturing is relatively new. AVANGARD will address it with Ideas Forward PC, an SME that runs specialized BC tech commercialization projects.