EU manufacturing is constantly becoming “more productive with less”, both in terms of material usage and energy consumption. The dynamics of global markets demand shorter product lifecycles and higher product variety, impacted by an increased volatility in demand. Traditional manufacturing systems are unsuitable to meet the new “think small” paradigm. They enable flexibility but at high operational complexity and for high volume operations to get lower cost production. To realise resilient factories and supply chains, it is mandatory to reduce complexity and cost of plug & produce modular manufacturing. MODUL4R envisions reliable, maintainable, affordable, (re)usable, and changeable SME-friendly autonomous modular factories and supply chains, able to manufacture new product in low-volumes and rapidly respond to unexpected events as well as the overall supply chain. MODUL4R proposes a holistic framework applicable both to new and existing manufacturing lines to achieve flexibility, rapid responsiveness, and sustainability. MODUL4R will be demonstrated in specialized mould manufacturing for the automotive sector, CPPS for flexible & modular assembly of PCBs, and tools manufacturing for the aerospace. MODUL4R focuses on 4 pillars, offering HW and SW components: Pillar 1: Resilience against changes in customer and societal demands and disruption on the supply chain Pillar 2: Modular technologies for flexible manufacturing operations Pillar 3: Simulation and interfaces to the Industrial Metaverse Pillar 4: Human centred technologies and upskilling The impact of MODUL4R for the EU Manufacturing industry, but also the society itself, can be summarised as follows: (i) Process ramp-up time (>20%), (ii) Speed in product shifting (>29%), (iii) Yield & CpK (>12% & >21%), (iv) OEE (>21%), (v) Part cost reduction (>15%) with over 41 MEUR ROI for the consortium, (vi) 408 new jobs, and (viii) help industry to reduce Energy consumption (>30%) through Automation of processes (>25%).

The transition towards a Circular Economy is estimated to represent a $4.5 trillion global growth opportunity by 2030. Digital Twins availability is largely recognized as an accelerator and an enabler of Circular Economy in business and in production, but significant challenges are still standing in relation to its development within the present technological framework, the needed skill sets, and the implementation costs. AUTO-TWIN addresses the technological shortcoming and economic liability of the current system-engineering model by 1) introducing a breakthrough method for automated process-aware discovery towards autonomous Digital Twins generation, to support trustworthy business processes in circular economies; 2) adopting an (International Data Space) IDS-based common data space, to promote and facilitate the secure and seamless exchange of manufacturing/product/business data within value-networks in a circular-economy ecosystem; 3) integrating novel hardware technologies into the digital thread, to create smart Green Gateways, empowering companies to perform data and digital twin enabled green decisions, and to unleash their full potential for actual zero-waste Circular Economy and reduced dependency from raw materials.

The vision of the 5Growth project is to empower verticals industries such as Industry 4.0, Transportation, and Energy with an AI-driven Automated and Sharable 5G End-to-End Solution that will allow these industries to achieve simultaneously their respective key performance targets. Towards this vision, 5Growth will automate the process for supporting diverse industry verticals through (i) a vertical portal in charge of interfacing verticals with the 5G End-to-End platforms, receiving their service requests and building the respective network slices on top, (ii) closed-loop automation and SLA control for vertical services lifecycle management and (iii) AI-driven end-to-end network solutions to jointly optimize Access, Transport, Core and Cloud, Edge and Fog resources, across multiple technologies and domains. The main objective of 5Growth is the technical and business validation of 5G technologies from the verticals’ points of view, following a field-trial-based approach on vertical sites (TRL 6-7). Multiple use cases of vertical industries (Comau, Efacec_S, Efacec_E, Innovalia) will be field-trialed on four vertical-owned sites in close collaboration with the vendors (Ericsson, Interdigital, NEC, Nokia) and the operators (Altice, Telecom Italia, Telefonica) in the project. 5Growth will leverage on the results of 5G-PPP Phase 2 projects where slicing, virtualization and multi-domain solutions for the creation and provisioning of vertical services are being developed and validated, e.g. 5G-TRANSFORMER and 5G-MONARCH. Two ICT-17-2018 5G End-to-End platforms, 5G EVE and 5G-VINNI, have been selected for the Trials to demonstrate the 5Growth specific vertical use cases. In addition to the impact on vertical-oriented standards (e.g., EN50126 (IEC62278) for railway signaling), the verticals in the consortium will be offered an opportunity to influence ongoing 5G standardization by leveraging the involvement of leading experts in the various relevant SDOs.