NIMBLE: collaboration Network for Industry, Manufacturing, Business and Logistics in Europe will develop the infrastructure for a cloud-based, Industrie 4.0, Internet-of-things-enabled B2B platform on which European manufacturing firms can register, publish machine-readable catalogs for products and services, search for suitable supply chain partners, negotiate contracts and supply logistics, and develop private and secure B2B and M2M information exchange channels to optimise business work flows. The infrastructure will be developed as open source software under an Apache-type, permissive license. The governance model is a federation of platforms for multi-sided trade, with mandatory interoperation functions and optional added-value business functions that can be provided by third parties. This will foster the growth of a net-centric business ecosystem for sustainable innovation and fair competition as envisaged by the Digital Agenda 2020. Prospective NIMBLE providers can take the open source infrastructure and bundle it with sectoral, regional or functional added value services and launch a new platform in the federation. Internet platforms need fast adoption rates and the work plan reflects this: we start attracting early adopters from day one and develop the initial, working platform in year one. Added-value business functions follow in year two and final validation at large scale, involving hundreds of external firms, will happen in year three. Our adoption plan is designed to enable two or more platform providers at the end of the project, and to have 1000 to 2000 enterprises connected to the overall ecosystem at that point. NIMBLE has 17 partners grouped around 3 main activities: developing the infrastructure, running a platform adoption programme, and validating the platform with 4 supply chains (white goods, wooden houses, fashion fabrics, and child care furniture). NIMBLE will give manufacturing SMEs in Europe a stable and sustainable digital ecosystem.

Manutelligence targets the product-service emerging trend; aiming at providing to EU manufacturing companies: - Efficiency in the design process, through ubiquitous cross-disciplinary collaborative management of P-S engineering knowledge across the entire life-cycle phases; - Complete integration of Product Lifecycle Management and Service Lifecycle Management, using methodologies and tools to support cross development; - Involvement of all the key partakers in the supply chain, including customers; - The ability to Search, retrieve and reuse data from heterogeneous data sources during design, manufacturing, testing and usage; - To manage, reuse and optimize designs, promoting modularity and Engineering Design Codified Knowledge, through KBE and design automation; - Close knowledge loop cycles between design, manufacturing, testing and use of products; - To extend and improve the use of Simulation and optimize it through comparison with test bench and real usage data; - Precise and quick measures and simulations of Cost and Sustainability issues, through Life Cycle Cost (LCC), Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and CO2 footprint . To achieve these needs, ManuTelligence aims to integrate best in class methodology and tools from research and industry, resulting in a secure, cross disciplinary collaborative Product/Service Design and Manufacturing Engineering Platform. This platform will enable designers and engineers to access through natural 3D experiences to data from both the traditional enterprise IT systems (CAD, CAX, PLM, MES, etc.) and IoT enabled systems for physical products information and knowledge management. Such a platform, to have success on the market, needs to be inclusive, facilitating the cooperation and collaboration of enterprises. For this reason, it has been decided from the draft architecture, that it will have interfaces based on Open Standard (e.g. STEP and the OpenGroup QLM.

For the purpose of creating digitalisation and automation solutions Arrowhead Tools adresses engineering methodologies and suitable integrated tool chains. With the global aim of substantial reduction of the engineering costs for digitalisation/automation solutions. Thus the Arrowhead Tools vision is: - Engineering processes and tool chains for cost efficient developments of digitalization, connectivity and automation systems solutions in various fields of application For the further and wider commercialisation of automation and digitalisation services and products based on SOA, Arrowhead Framework and similar technologies there is a clear need for engineerings tools that integrates existing automation and digitalisation engineering procedures and tool with SOA based automation/digitalisation technology. For this purpose the Arrowhead Tool’s grand challenges are defined as: - Engineering costs reduction by 40-60% for a wide range of automation/digitalisation solutions. - Tools chains for digitalisation and automation engineering and management, adapted to: 1. existing automation and digitalisation engineering methodologies and tools 2. new IoT and SoS automation and digitalisation engineering and management tools 3. security management tools - Training material and kits for professional engineers The results will create impact on: - Automation and digitalisation solution market - Automation and engineering efficiency and the SSBS market - Automation and digitalisation security - Competence development on engineering of automation and digitalisation solution