The Pledger project aims at delivering a new architectural paradigm and a toolset that will pave the way for next generation edge computing infrastructures, tackling the modern challenges faced today and coupling the benefits of low latencies on the edge, with the robustness and resilience of cloud infrastructures. The project will deliver a set of tools and processes that will enable a) edge computing providers to enhance the stability and performance effectiveness of their edge infrastructures, through modelling the overheads and optimal groupings of concurrently running services, runtime analysis and adaptation, thus gaining a competitive advantage b) edge computing adopters to understand the computational nature of their applications, investigate abstracted and understandable QoS metrics, facilitate trust and smart contracting over their infrastructures and identify how they can balance their cost and performance to optimise their competitiveness and monitor their SLAs. By providing this toolset, the project will allow also third parties to act as independent validators of QoS features in IoT applications, enabling new decentralised applications and business models, thus filling a large gap in the emerging edge/IoT computing market landscape. The project validates its results through three use cases which are very relevant for the innovative edge/cloud computing concepts it plans to introduce: namely in manufacturing, mixed reality and smart cities application domains.

Multimaterial systems combining metals with thermoplastic fiber reinforced polymer composites (TP-FRPC) are the key for light weight design in the automotive industry. However, the joining of the material partners remains main issue. Currently, no approach exists which sufficiently meets the three core requirements: weight neutrality, cost- and time efficiency and bonding strength. Technologies like adhesive bonding or bolted joints show good results for one or two of the criterions, but not for all three of them. The FlexHyJoin project aims at the development of a joining process for hybrid components, which satisfies all three criterions. Induction Joining (IJ) and Laser Joining (LJ) are combined, since they have complementary fields of application and most of all they do not require additional material and are therefore weight neutral joining methods. Thus, the full lightweight potential is preserved. Additionally, a surface texturing method for the metal is integrated in the approach, which leads to a form closure bonding, providing a high mechanical bonding performance. Finally, a main aspect of the FlexHyJoin project is to integrate the surface texturing as well as both joining methods in a single, continuous, and fully automatized pilot process with an overall process control and supervision system. This leads to a maximum of time- and cost-efficiency and will allow the future application of the approach in the mass production of automotives. The key for the automation is an online process control and quality assurance. The FlexHyJoin project provides an essential enabler technology for future mobility concepts. The final result is an innovative joining process for fiber reinforced polymers and metals, suiting the strict requirements of automotive industry and enabling the broad application of hybrid material systems.

Sport Infinity aims to identify and develop innovative partly waste-based long-fibre reinforced composites enabling the automatic production of easily customisable plastic sports goods. The project will focus on the production of balls and shoes and will adopt a design-driven approach exploiting the automation potential of rotation moulding processes, which offer significant design freedom. The innovation potential of the moulding processes to be employed originates from their capacity of bonding together a multitude of different materials, while effecting external product shaping without using glue and/or other adhesives. The starting point is the development of composite materials superimposed in the form of layers in variable ways according to the targeted (custom) shape and the required properties. The insertion of decorative elements in the mould will enable design custom designs, along with 3D printing. An end-to-end collaborative design innovation will be adopted. The Sport Infinity consortium gathers expertise across the value chain from design to material development, production, marketing and distribution and across multiple disciplines industrial design, material science, recycling and industrial processes. The new flexible automatic production, can set a paradigm of competitive production Made in Europe favouring ranging from modular factories to in-store production cells.

MetaFacturing focuses on a digitized toolchain for metal part production which will lead to a more resilient production process with respect to the raw materials used (e.g., recycled materials), reduces operator effort and cost, and reduces scrap due to out-of-specification parts. The vision is to create a widely-applicable Digital Twin based process setup and control framework, fulfilling the requirements of industrial scale parts manufacturers (with a specific focus on metal parts) whose central hurdle is the effective use of available part and process data to improve the time-to-market and product quality. This framework will strongly leverage on a range of state-of-the-art technologies in the field of model-based data fusion, efficient process simulation, and data standardisation, and continuous Life Cycle Assessment in order to efficiently develop solutions which are tailored for deployment in industry. MetaFacturing project brings together 6 market leaders (FRONIUS, NEMAK, FILL, VITRONIC, BENTELER and LTH) which will closely cooperate in order to reach a new level of leadership in sustainable manufacturing while maintaining their respective market dominance. The envisaged approach will exploit all available data in the process, starting from material data, in-process measurements, end-of-line quality control and sampling-based product validation. The Digital Twin based approach will enable the holistic consideration of this data in order to provide automatic feedback for the process control, as well as providing novel (meta-)data on the materials used which will be valuable to train the engineers working with these materials.