Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AUTOWARE (Wireless Autonomous, Reliable and Resilient ProductIon Operation ARchitecture for Cognitive Manufacturing)

Teaser

Markets, business models, manufacturing processes and other challenges along the value chain are all changing at an increasing speed in an increasingly interconnected world where new opportunities and threats appear constantly. Current practice is such that a production system...

Summary

Markets, business models, manufacturing processes and other challenges along the value chain are all changing at an increasing speed in an increasingly interconnected world where new opportunities and threats appear constantly. Current practice is such that a production system is designed and optimized to execute the exact same process over and over again. The planning and control of production systems has become increasingly complex regarding flexibility and productivity, as well as the decreasing predictability of processes. While the building blocks for digital automation are available, it is up to the SMEs to align, connect and integrate them together to meet the needs of their individual advanced manufacturing processes. Moreover, SMEs face difficulties to make decisions on strategic automation investments that will boost their business strategy.

AUTOWARE will establish and push forward an open CPPS ecosystem, allowing SMEs to access all the different components in order to develop digital automation cognitive solutions for their manufacturing processes.
- Manufacturing SMEs which will be able to develop digital cognitive automation systems thanks to a facilitated access to several ICT tools.
- Automation and machine tool/robot providers which can incorporate open CPS trusted platforms as part of next generation smart production line components and solutions.
- Developers of cognitive (learning, analysis, knowledge management capability services) and automation apps for autonomous service support.
- Providers of cloud and HPC simulation and computation services that could host the operation of advanced cognitive services.

AUTOWARE high-level objective is to build an open consolidated ecosystem and single community that will lower the barriers of SMMEs for cognitive automation application development and application of autonomous manufacturing processes.
- Leveraging reference heterogeneous communications and networking architecture to support connectivity & data management in CPPS.
- Provisioning of robust business development frameworks that will drive a business-oriented and RoI rooted approach to migration towards digital automation.
- Facilitate the growth of a digital multi-sided ecosystem through the set-up of an open ecosystem to facilitate the access to digitalization technologies to SMMEs.
- Alignment with major international standards and integration with key experimental infrastructures and ICT for Manufacturing innovation hubs.

Work performed

During the first half of the project, an innovative methodology for requirements engineering f has been developed and implemented; such a method has been applied to the three use cases for identifying requirements and KPIs to be used by the other WPs.
In wp2 a hierarchical communications and data management architecture have been designed. The proposed architecture considers the use of RAN Slicing and Cloud RAN as enabling technologies to meet reliably and effectively future Industry 4.0 autonomous assembly scenarios and modular plug & play manufacturing systems. The designed Software Defined Autonomous Service Platform reference architecture in WP3 broadens the overall AUTOWARE reference architecture with reconfigurable robotic workcell, mixed or dual reality supported automation and digital product memory technologies. The WP4 study of the impact of emerging technologies and paradigms has been performed together with the analysis of the manufacturing challenges faced by SMEs. An open CPPS platform has been proposed based on a fog/edge node architecture and open technologies supported has been presented (Docker, OPC UA, AMQP, CODESYS, Grafana, MQTT, TSN).
The industrial use cases set-ups have been designed in WP5 to extend and enhance neutral experimentation infrastructures that are available to SMEs and industry (collaborative robotics-Tekniker, automation processes –SmartFactoryKL and reconfigurable work-cells -JSI), and to validate the requirements of industrial deployment (cognitive automation and collaborative and cognitive assembly).
WP6 innovation, dissemination and communication strategies and plans have been defined, focused on creating awareness around AUTOWARE exploitable results. The connection with I4MS community has been analysed, performing identification and contact within the External Industrial interest group management plan. The consortium is working on the Digital Shopfloor Alliance building up in collaboration with Daedalus and Far-Edge projects.
WP7 has identified the relevant standards derived from the according research field of the specific partners. Additionally, Autoware has identified a first interesting group of organizations that can have an influence on the development within AUTOWARE or where results from the project can have an influence on or even provide a source for dissemination/exploitation of possible results from the project.

Final results

The full potential of open CPS has yet to be fully realized in the context of cognitive autonomous production systems. The mission of AUTOWARE is to leverage an automation pyramid evolution, an open CPPS service platform and ecosystem with a vision of autonomous and cognitive CPPS that “can think”. The approach of AUTOWARE is to leverage this reference architecture across I4MS competence domains, acting as a glue that will attract potential users and developers to a friendly ecosystem for business development but also for more efficient service development over harmonized architectures (smart machine-cloudified control- cloudified planning- app-ized operation). AUTOWARE will extend and adapt the CPS TAPP framework to meet the needs of manufacturing automation, as opposed of the general TAPPS framework that looks into general CPS systems with not sufficient attention to the particularities of CPPS evolutions. Thus, cognitive manufacturing systems will benefit from a solid and trustable app framework to deal with the needs of autonomous planning and control. AUTOWARE approach will be to connect and extend the FIWARE for Industry resources and assets to the digital automation community so synergies emerge both in terms of multi-sided business opportunities and amount of resources that are made available to the cognitive automation community to build their autonomous solutions and apps.
AUTOWARE approach is to set and use the business development framework as the overarching and driving element of the AUTOWARE ecosystem guiding the manufacturing side of the digital ecosystem through the digital automation ocean as a digital compass for technology selection and digital automation solution development. This business enabler is critical for the development of the demand side, while the platform alignment and app-ization framework is critical to development of the offer side.
The last dimension of the AUTOWARE approach is connected to the development of specific tools and enablers for autonomous process design and operation. The design, deployment and operation of CPPS systems (cognitive) demand significant investments and knowledge in various highly complementary fields of expertise. It is based on this rationale that AUTOWARE is proposing an approach to deal with a significant improvement both of the design tools for CPPS but also the self-discovery, functional capability exposure mechanisms and autonomous configuration of systems deployed based on elaborate digital model specification.

Website & more info

More info: http://autoware-eu.org/.