Improvements of the overall sustainability of process industries from an economic, environmental and social point of view require the adoption of a new industrial symbiosis paradigm - the human-mimetic symbiosis - where critical resources (materials, energy, waste and by-products) are coordinated among multiple autonomous Production Units organized in industrial clusters. SYMBIOPTIMA will improve European process industry efficiency levels by: (a) developing a cross-sectorial energy & resource management platform for intra- and inter-cluster streams, characterized by a holistic model for the definition, life-cycle assessment and business management of a human-mimetic symbiotic cluster. The platform multi-layer architecture integrates process optimization and demand response strategies for the synergetic optimization of energy and resources within the sectors and across value chains. (b) Developing extensive, multi-disciplinary, modular and “plug&play” monitoring and elaboration of all relevant information flows of the symbiotic cluster. (c) Integrating all thermal energy sources, flows and sinks of the cluster into a systemic unified vision, as nodes of smart thermal energy grid. (d) Taking into account disruptive increase of cross-sectorial re-use for particularly impacting waste streams, proposing advanced WASTE2RESOURCE initiatives for PET. The development of such a holistic framework will pave the way for future cross-sectorial interactions and potentialities. Furthermore, the adoption of available LCSA and interoperability standards will grant easy upgradability of legacy devices and a large adoption by device producers. Modularity, extendibility and upgradability of all developed tools will improve scalability and make the SYMBIOPTIMA approach suitable both at small and large scale. Rapid transfer from lab-scale to testing at demonstration sites will be eased by the presence of industrial partners and end-users, as Bilfinger, Siemens, SXS, and Neo Group.

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 DIGITbrain project is deeply rooted in the innovation ecosystem of the I4MS project CloudiFacturing and the industrial platforms FIWARE and IDS, and it will build on these results, by means of extending the CloudiFacturing solution with an augmented digital-twin concept called “Digital Product Brain” (DPB) and a smart business model called “Manufacturing as a Service” (MaaS). By having access to on-demand data, models, algorithms, and resources for industrial products (i.e. mechatronic systems supporting the production of other products), the DBP will enable their customisation and adaptation according to individual conditions. The availability of industrial-product capacity will facilitate the implementation of MaaS, which will allow manufacturing SMEs to access advanced manufacturing facilities within their regions or to distribute their orders across different ones. The DIGITbrain project will address four principles that will foster the uptake of advanced digital and manufacturing technologies. A) Technology: leverage edge-, cloud- and HPC-based modelling, simulation, optimisation, analytics, and machine learning tools and augment the concept of digital twin with a memorizing capacity that records the provenance of the industrial product over its full lifecycle. B) Feasibility: support more than 20 highly innovative cross-border experiments, bringing together technology providers and manufacturing end users, and facilitating cost-effective distributed and localised production, based on on-demand manufacturing machine capacity. C) Sustainability: coach and empower DIHs to implement the smart business model MaaS and contribute to their long-term sustainability, by increasing their portfolio with services tailored to the industrial needs of their regions. D) Network of DIHs: engage DIHs across Europe that implement MaaS, enable manufacturing SMEs to co-create and experiment with digital innovations before investing, and attract national and regional funding.

Daedalus is conceived to enable the full exploitation of the CPS concept of virtualized intelligence, through the adoption of a completely distributed automation platform based on IEC-61499 standard, fostering the creation of a Digital Ecosystem that could go beyond the current limits of manufacturing control systems and propose an ever-growing market of innovative solutions for the design, engineering, production and maintenance of plants’ automation. The following objectives will be reached: -)Ease the conception, development and distribution of intelligence into CPS for real-time execution of orchestrated manufacturing tasks; -)Foster interoperability of CPS from different vendors at orchestration-level (= “between CPS”); -)Simplify the design, implementation and integration of optimal coordinating control intelligence of CPS; -)Enable near-real-time co-simulation of manufacturing systems as a fully integrated “service” of a CPS; -)Create a Digital Marketplace to simplify the matchmaking between offer and demand within the Ecosystem; -)Conceive a multi-sided business model for the Automation Ecosystem and the corresponding business plans for its Complementors; -)Foster the widespread acceptance of the Ecosystem platform to guarantee success and impact of Daedalus multi-sided market. The project approach is based on 3 technological pillars, one platform pillar and a final ecosystem pillar: 1)IEC61499-based reconfigurable automation platform for distributed orchestration of interoperable CPS; 2)“Simulation-as-a-service” for integrated near-real-time co-simulation of CPS behavioural models; 3)Advanced SDKs for simplified design of hierarchically distributed optimal control applications; 4)Digital Marketplace for the creation of an interdependent ecosystem of automation solutions providers; 5)Proof-of-concept showcases to accelerate the involvement of “complementors” and the maturation of the Ecosystem.

Improving industrial energy efficiency at European Manufacturing level requires the integration of energy data with advanced optimization techniques to guide a company decision making. E2COMATION intends to address the optimization of energy usage, at multiple hierarchical layers of a manufacturing process as well as considering the whole life-cycle perspective across the value chain. To this purpose, it aims at providing a cross-sectorial methodological framework and a modular technological platform to monitor, predict, evaluate impact of the behavior of a factory across energy and the life-cycle assessment dimensions, in order to adapt and optimize dynamically not only its real-time behavior over different time-scales, but also its strategic and sustainable positioning with respect to the complex supply and value chain it belongs to. Its major objectives are: - Holistic analysis of energy-related data streams for production performance forecasting; - Life-cycle conceptual paradigm applied to digital twinning of factory assets; - Factory-level integrated multi-objective optimization architecture; - Modular and scalable automation platform for distributed monitoring and supervision; - Comprehensive simulation environment enhanced with energy and environmental performance; - Energy Aware Planning and Scheduling tool (EAP&S); - Life Cycle Assessment and Costing tool (LCAC) integrated in a company Decision Support System; - Sustainable Computer Aided Process Planning (s-CAPP); - LCA-driven supply chain management (SCM) and business ecosystem. For E2COMATION to be successful, it is fundamental that the effectiveness of its methodological approach and technological framework is proved in complex industrial scenarios, involving several factories of different sectors. This will be achieved by implementing the project platform in 2 completely different value chains, the food and drink one and the woodworking one, with 5 concurrent industrial use-cases.