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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FIRST (virtual Factories: Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion)

Teaser

Summary

The project â€œvF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTionâ€ (FIRST) provides the new technology and methodology to describe manufacturing assets; to compose and integrate the existing services into collaborative virtual manufacturing processes, and to deal with the evolution of changes. The consortium has achieved relevant scientific contributions, created new collaborations and enhanced existing ones, and proposed and implemented well-attended training and networking activities. The FIRST project delivered two technical deliverables for WP1 and one technical deliverable for WP2 as well as four managerial deliverables for WP7.

The project for the final period, the concrete designs of manufacturing asset/service discovery and composition methods (D3.1), on-the-fly service oriented process verification methods (D4.1) and interoperability framework of virtual factory and business innovation (D5.1) need to be completed, which would lead to the FIRST overarching objective to enhance manufacturing integration through the application of advanced IT solutions, the innovative project brings together an experienced researcher with expertise in the designing an interoperability framework for facilitating interoperability on data/information, services and process levels respectively. We also expect these outcomes lead to significant business innovations for virtual factories, for example, to bring current partner organization from a traditional manufactory into an advance manufactory align with industry 4.0.

Work performed

The project has achieved most of the goals planned for the 1st Periodic Report (first 24 months), regarding research and networking activities. The consortium has achieved relevant scientific contributions, created new collaborations and enhanced existing ones, and proposed and implemented well-attended training and networking activities. Most of the tasks have advanced or been completed as expected, and deliverables have been submitted and approved. However, the secondments implementation has important deviations with respect to the secondment plan included in the proposal. We highlight some publications which represent concrete scientific achievements.

In this first period a large part of the work has focussed on identifying and reviewing existing approaches relevant to the project as well as identifying requirements and possible approaches. As such we made a study of approaches to collaborative business process verification supporting working packages 1, 2 and 4. In addition we studied design-time and run-time verification of processes in relation to compliance with business and governmental rules.

In relation to interoperability we analysed the requirements for, and main challenges that must be addressed to support an integrated and scalable factory architecture. An architecture that is characterized by access to services, aggregation of data, and orchestration of production processes. Based upon this an architectural framework was developed.

To address the challenge of process composition and asset discovery we have looked at the usage of semantic search technologies to facilitate discovery. A user-aware, semantic, enterprise search engine solution was proposed that forms the basis of further work in relation to working package 3.

In summary, the first reporting period has led to outcomes in terms of foundational notions being established, requirements being clear. In addition new approaches, and prototypes, were developed for evaluation and enhancement in the context of the first project.

Final results

The scientific research done during all the completed secondments and generated during the training and networking events was published in top quality international journals and conferences. It is remarkable the high number of publications generated during these collaborations, taking into account that this list of publications does not include other research articles or papers published by members of the consortium but not directly related with FIRST funding, even if those articles are related with the progress of the action and contributed to the development of the field. Some publications are accepted, which are not published yet.

The project FIRST provides the new technology and methodology to describe manufacturing assets; to compose and integrate the existing services into collaborative virtual manufacturing processes, and to deal with the evolution of changes. From the overarching objective to enhance manufacturing integration through the application of advanced IT solutions, the innovative project brings together an experienced researcher with expertise in the designing an interoperability framework for facilitating interoperability on data/information, services and process levels respectively.

We have already published three articles at German professorial journals, which we will continue to popular our ideas and results. We will engage with Industry 4.0 events in different countries and ventures. The project website (https://www.h2020first.eu/first/bin/view/Main/) appears as the No. 5th on the first page using â€˜EU FIRST Projectâ€™ as a keyword search through google.com and as No. 2nd on the first page using â€˜virtual factory projectâ€™ as a keyword search through google.com.

We are looking for applying a new EU H2020 project. In short, these outcomes lead to significant business innovations for virtual factories, made possible by an internationally recognised group expertise in (manufacturing) services/assets description languages, semantic services discover methods, and automated interoperability.