Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are key to the digitization of the industrial sector; however, less than 25% of industrial companies in Europe benefit from ICT-based solutions.
To democratically boost the competitiveness of European manufacturers (especially Small and Medium Enterprises – SMEs), innovative solutions must consider technological and commercial scalability from the outset.
From this perspective, the service cloud has become the ideal enabler in the digitization of manufacturing. Successful European initiatives such as CloudFlow, CloudSME or Fortissimo have demonstrated the benefits of cloud engineering services by combining HPC resources, computational tools and cloud computing platforms.
Manufacturing SMEs are empowered to calculate and solve problems that cannot be addressed without cloud and HPC technology, making them more competitive by reducing development times for innovative products with improved performance. The results of these initiatives are encouraging engineering and, to some extent, prototyping processes within the manufacturing workflow. However, the monitoring and optimization of production processes have not yet benefited much from an integrated information workflow and simulation cycle based on online factory data.
The consolidated platform between CloudFlow and CloudSME will be extended with capabilities to process factory data and enriched with additional manufacturing process simulation tools. It will be accessed through a central interface, allowing stakeholders to interact and collaborate. The protection of stakeholder data will be safeguarded with a proven security and privacy framework. In addition to the technological aspects, the start-ups founded by CloudFlow (clesgo) and CloudSME (cloudSME UG) are establishing a strategic alliance to adopt a common sustainable business model for the holistic solution. Three waves of application experiments will validate the applicability of the results by providing novel requirements and challenging business and use cases.
CloudiFacturing is a project that is open to new (teams of) participants (third parties). With our Open Calls, we look for innovative use cases in the context of the project’s mission. CloudiFacturing’s mission is to optimize production processes and producibility through cloud/HPC-based modeling and simulation, leveraging online factory data and advanced data analytics, thus contributing to the competitiveness and resource efficiency of manufacturing SMEs, ultimately fostering the vision of Factories 4.0 and the circular economy. To fulfill this mission, computationally demanding production engineering and simulation, as well as data analysis tools, will be provided as cloud services to facilitate accessibility and make their use more affordable.
CloudiFacturing will empower more than 60 European organizations (many of them manufacturing SMEs) and support around 20 transnational application experiments to be selected mainly through two open calls.
SHION’s approach will use cognitive technologies (especially deep learning algorithms) to be able to extract knowledge to generate a predictive model to detect when a defect is going to occur in production considering mainly information from the thermoplastic injection process itself, with the intrinsic injection machine parameters for each part, as well as context information such as environmental conditions, operator review, quality lab inspections and part weight. It also admits the constant evolution of the cognitive models generated. Our innovative approach will optimize injection processes by introducing cognitive technologies (DB, ML, DL and the cloud) by extracting knowledge from data acquired from:
Our solutions aim to improve the efficiency, quality and productivity of monitored manufacturing processes by anticipating potential failures. During the Cloudingfacturing experiment, 2 Thermolympic production lines will be considered for enabling:
