European manufacturing competes in a global knowledge-driven economy, and thus increasingly seeks competitive advantage through quality, agility and personalisation based on latest advances in IT. Increasing utilisation of IT in mission-critical elements of the production brings opportunities for consistency, transparency and flexibility, bringing the “lot size of 1” closer to reality even for mass-production industries. Most relevant to achieve the expected increase of production performance for highly customized products is to master the complexity of the supply chain and logistics in the global production networks. Ad-hoc collaboration and setup of production coalitions with a wide spectrum of suppliers and service providers is necessary to answer the customization wishes of customers for their individual products in short time, high quality, and at affordable costs. Innovations from small high-tech companies requested by customers have to be integrated into the traditional industrial processes using novel organisational concepts and setups. DIGICOR will address the development of a collaboration platform, tools, and services for the setup and coordination of production networks and in particular the integration of non-traditional, small, yet innovative companies (SMEs) and logistics providers into the supply chain of large manufacturers (OEMs). The solution is based on an open platform integrating tools and services and implementing case specific governance rules and procedures for collaboration, knowledge protection, and security. The open platform will provide services creating a marketplace for the collaboration partners, for planning and control of the collaborative production and the logistics and risk management. It will be open to third parties to add services for advanced analytics, simulation, or optimization etc. The platform will provide seamless connectivity to the automation solutions, smart objects, and real-time data sources across the network

It becomes apparent particularly in process industries that cognition can improve the behaviour of a complex process system. One of the main expectations of the use of digital twins is to give us the capability to observe and monitor the behaviour of their respective physical twins. In order to make it happen, we need to combine digital twins, which are driven by domain models (i.e. knowledge), with the models derived from data (i.e. experience). In order to realize it, we need a real-time processing layer where observations (i.e. events), knowledge and experience interoperate to understand and control the behaviour of a complex system (i.e. cognition). FACTLOG offers such a layer and aims at deploying and adjusting it to several process industries. By incorporating different pipelines of machine learning and analytical tools at different levels (from machines to process steps and from processes to the whole production plant), FACTLOG enables the realization of the Cognitive Factory as an ensemble of independent but intertwined ECTs, that are (i) able to self-learn, and thus to effectively detect and react to anomalies and disruptions but also to opportunities that may arise, (ii) enjoy a local or global view of operations and (iii) are capable for short-, mid- and long-term reasoning and optimization. FACTLOG is driven by several specific, yet indicative, business cases in the process industry and focuses its innovation regarding analytics, AI and optimization on the deployment and assessment of coherent Enhanced Cognitive Twins for the specific sectors represented in FACTLOG and even for the plants in which it will be pilot tested and evaluated. It will be implemented by a just right consortium of twenty partners, five of which are manufacturers and a further three represent manufacturing clusters. Technology and scientific contributors from leading academic institute and focused ICT vendors (mostly SMEs) bring in all necessary knowledge and innovation.

The EFPF project realises a federated smart factory ecosystem by primarily interlinking 4 smart factory platforms, from the FoF-11-2016 cluster, through an open and interoperable Data Spine. The federation of the 4 base platforms is complemented by industrial platforms, collaboration tools and smart factory systems, specifically selected to support connected factories in lot-size-one manufacturing. The federated EFPF platform delivers enhances value and reduces the barrier to innovation by providing seamless access to services and solutions that are currently dispersed. In parallel the platform provides the necessary infrastructure, tools and support for novel service creation and validations by third parties. Further, by fostering healthy competition in the smart factory ecosystem, the EFPF platform will ensure that the needs of the evolving smart manufacturing industry are met for the long term. The EFPF federation is offered to the manufacturing and logistic companies as an open platform; to utilise the offered functionality, experiment with innovation approaches and develop custom solutions based on specific needs. The project demonstrates the power of federation through 3 embedded large scale pilots focusing on lot-size-one manufacturing and sustainable value networks in diverse sectors, while a cross sectorial circular economy pilot is also incorporated. The results of the pilots are openly made available as lessons learned and best practices. The creation of the European smart factory ecosystem is supported by offering interested companies technical and financial support. A dedicated budget is allocated to offer financial support to companies who are interested in using the EFPF platform to enhance their businesses. The project is primarily composed of SMEs who have the agility to quickly react and adopt innovative solutions, while experience and market reach of big players such Siemens and others is also leveraged.