Achieving resiliency in value networks through modelling and Manufacturing as a Service (Made in Europe Partnership) (RIA)

Topic description

ExpectedOutcome:

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Availability of reliable models, simulators, digital twins, decision making and planning technologies for specific value networks, providing timely scoreboard views and enabling a better understanding of the impact of unforeseen events on manufacturing and industrial production.
• Availability of technologies to swiftly adapt logistics and production to varying external conditions, improving the resilience of the industrial systems and value chains, and the sustainability of the entire production process.
• Smart manufacturing networks that are resilient and capable of self-adaptation in response to external threats.

Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) is a distributed system of production in which resources (including data and software) are offered as services, allowing manufacturers to access distributed providers to implement their manufacturing processes. This topic approaches MaaS from the value network perspective, aiming at exploiting the intrinsic flexibility and resilience provided by the possibility to use distributed and programmable resources on demand, under real-world conditions characterised by high volatility of the supply, the market requirements and the external constraints.

Proposals should develop:

• Realistic actionable models of value chains, which allow humans to react timely and better understand the impact of external events on the industrial system, and to propose simulations and scenarios that will appropriately respond to those events and optimise industrial production.
• Solutions that make use of the flexibility of the manufacturing ecosystem to respond to external events, enabling trusted cross organisation real-time data integration / exchange based on standards, and supporting the partial automation of the processes from the confirmation of the order up to the delivery of the product.

Models and simulations should be developed from a human-centred perspective, and lead to instructions for automated manufacturing and re-manufacturing facilities that can implement the retained scenarios and adapt production processes, stock levels and any other variables of the manufacturing and logistic flow, optimising production in terms of resilience, agility. The potential of a circular approach to address resilience should be considered.

Resiliency to failures should be taken into account, resulting in the capability to guarantee useful outputs and reliable production even under non-optimal conditions. Multidisciplinary research activities should address the way to develop robust models on the basis of uncertain and incomplete data, and to translate those models into practically usable digital twins, which can produce actionable information and instructions.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination, and demonstrate their results through at least two realistic use cases.

The results will contribute to making Manufacturing as a Service technically and economically viable, and are expected to improve to both the competitiveness of industry and the circularity and sustainability of the production/logistic processes. Proposals should explain how the proposed approach contributes to these objectives through measurable targets.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership “Made in Europe”.

Activities are expected to start at TRL 3 and achieve TRL 6 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.