Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ICP4Life (An Integrated Collaborative Platform for Managing the Product-Service Engineering Lifecycle)

Teaser

The European manufacturing industry faces new challenges, which are currently not addressed by today’s products and systems. Most of the products are still in essence ‘simple’ in nature, with no capability for adapting to the consumers’ needs and no integrated methods...

Summary

The European manufacturing industry faces new challenges, which are currently not addressed by today’s products and systems. Most of the products are still in essence ‘simple’ in nature, with no capability for adapting to the consumers’ needs and no integrated methods exist for the holistic acquisition and processing of feedback information emanating from product-services. ICP4Life proposes an integrated, collaborative platform for the design, development and support of product-service systems for SMEs (99% of companies in Europe), equipment manufacturers and energy suppliers in order to maximize the impact in the European industry.

Two separate pilot cases have been defined in ICP4Life in an early stage so as to enhance the applicability of the developments in real life scenarios:
• The first pilot case (Equipment manufacturer) focuses on the configuration of a requested manufacturing equipment which will include sensors regarding energy monitoring, process fault detection and prediction and an additional Wi-Fi connector. The requested services will deal with maintenance support, product evolution (SW updates) and monitoring of the energy consumption and the overall performance of the equipment. The equipment manufacturer will use the ICP4Life Designer together with a sensor company in order to design/configure the requested product and services. The ICP4Life Planner will be used at the same time in order to configure the supply of the necessary extra parts (including sensors). Finally, one of the equipment manufacturer’s departments will create the necessary services using the ICP4Life Customizer templates and generate the UIs related to providing the necessary data and updates.

• The second pilot case (Energy supply) focuses on the management of the energy demand creating benefit for both the customers of the energy supplier and the supplier. The customers of the energy supplier, especially the industrial ones, will use the ICP4Life Customizer to request services related to the monitoring of the energy consumption in different levels (e.g. shop floor, machine), towards changing their usage pattern and having more efficient and environmental friendly energy use behavior. This will also give the energy supplier the opportunity to balance the energy demand of customers supported by the services through encouraging them to move their energy demand away from the peak hours.

Work performed

The work carried out during the first period of the ICP4LIfe project (months from 1 to 12) concerned the specification of the different ICP4Life sub-components towards the achievement of each listed objective. More specifically:
• The definition, validation and classification of the ICP4Life requirements.
• The analysis of current practices and the transformation of ICP4Life requirements into specification of the different components.
• The specification of the ICP4Life Designer and Planner requirements will contribute to the reduction of the lead times in product development and process planning for product-services, as well as improve the sustainability of products.
• The reduction of set-up and ramp-up times will be achieved through the services that will be offered to the customer, i.e. web-based process monitoring and machine health monitoring services. The requirements of the services have been specified during the first year of the project and their design has begun. These two services are expected to help customer reach faster the desired production levels.
• The reduction of the environmental footprint of products is an objective that will be achieved through offering a set of different services to the customers, the requirements of which have been specified in the first year of the project. The web-based process monitoring service offered by will provide energy consumption an environmental impact information to customers, enabling them to change their behavior towards reducing the environmental impact of the machine. Furthermore, the energy demand service offered by TAURON will enable customers to change their daily energy profile, reducing the energy-related costs and consequently the environmental footprint of their industry.

During the second period of the ICP4Life project (months from 13 to 30) the main tasks performed are summarized as follows:
• The design, the development and the integration of the software prototypes of the Designer, Customizer, Planner and Procurement modules. As by M30 of the project all prototypes of all modules are accessible online, in a private workspace hosted by LMS here: http://150.140.148.201:8191/en/welcome
• The implementation of the first cycle of the integration among the Designer, Customizer, Planner and Procurement modules. In this sense integration means that these modules though the knowledge repository may share and act upon the same data. The integration among the modules has been achieved by M30 refers to a configuration of a Product Service System (PSS) with one service and one sensor
• The design and definition and initial implementation of services. By M30 9 services have been defined (5 for PRIMA, 3 for TAURON and 1 for BAZIGOS).
• The design and initial implementation of the Services framework that supports the initial definition of the services as well as the runtime phase of the services (the services are deployed “on top” of the services framework).
• The detailed pilot cases for both the equipment manufacturers (PRIMA and BAZIGOS) and the energy supplier (TAURON) have been defined.
• The exploitation results of the project have been identified and the key strategies to exploit the results in each case have been defined. The plan is to exploit the whole ICP4life platform, customized in the needs of the a) big equipment manufacturer provider (PRIMA), b) mold producer SME (BAZIGOS) and c) energy providers (TAURON).

Final results

The ICP4Life project will address the current needs of today’s manufacturers, providing faster design of modular equipment and components, the seamless collaboration of engineers across a wider network of companies as well as within a single company with disperse engineering offices and production sites and the reuse of knowledge regarding both products, services and processes for new projects or the configuration of existing lines. Finally, an opportunity arises through the use of three different components covering the whole lifecycle of a product, to measure and control the entire environmental impact of a product, through relevant services.

The project achievements are realized through six distinct sub-projects:
• WP1: Elicitation of all requirements and specifications for the elements of the ICP4Life platform.
• WP2-WP5: Design and development of the product-service design component, the customization component, the component responsible for the realization of the product-service and the services supported by the products.
• WP7-8: Definition and setup of the industrial use cases and validation of the ICP4Life platform.


The expected results of the ICP4Life developments are:
• Reduced lead times in product development and process planning for modular product-services by 30%
• Improved sustainability and decreased time-to-market by 20%
• Reduced set-up and ramp-up times by up to 40%
• Reduced environmental footprint of products by up to 30%
• Improved energy behavior of industrial customers.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.icp4life.eu.