The First Year of CyberFactory#1

CyberFactory#1 has now been officially running over a year with the start of the Spanish consortium in December 2018. Here is a short overview of what has happened in the first year of CyberFactory#1.

All partners from the six countries are now funded (besides the French consortium, which remains self-funded). Partners have met internationally for five times to coordinate efforts, plan contributions and interlink the individual contribution to make it a truly collaborative project.

The first year was focused on these coordinating efforts and define the use-cases as well misuse-cases of the project. This is the base to achieve the project aims of key capabilities of the Factory of the Future (FoF) which address both opportunities and threats of the future factory system as a system of systems (SoS). Work package two (WP2) had its core the task to define new possible business models of the FoF, the use-cases of eight partners, the corresponding misuse-cases and a SoS and validation plan for the subsequent work packages. This work is close at its end and first results will be published in the following weeks.

Partners during the STG-4 meeting in Oulu 

Work is fully underway in WP3 that has as it aims to understand, model, communicate, and analyse the key aspects of the FoF and their dependencies. This involves an executable CPS models to be used as digital twins in the simulation-based evaluation, including the needed validation steps for these models, economic models, suitable to represent the interface between the FoF and its eco-system in terms of goods, services, data, and transactions, and  models of human behaviour. In a concluding step, partners will focus on the interdependencies and look at the FoF as a socio-technical system, enabling to understand the behaviour of the FoF as a result of technical, economic, and social forces applied to the factory of today. All models will kept alive throughout the project to support experiments and assessments of porject innovations.

Partners recently met in Oulu, Finland for the fourth strategic meeting. A key element of the meeting was the one-year review by ITEA, which was sucessfully held. During this meeting partner contributions to WP3 were reviewed, missing links and collaborations found. Additionally, WP4  focusing on FoF optimization and self-improvement was kicked off and tasks leaders of WP5, which focues on dynamic risk management and resilience, met to coordinate among themselves before the WP will start in a couple of weeks. The next meeting will be held in Barcelona on April 15th to 17th.