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%).

VISION: By 2023, Europe will set the reference for the Industry 4.0 market: European CPS/IOT Open Digital Platforms providers will be able to flexibly and dynamically connect the Real World with digital Enterprise Systems through common open standards; European ICT SMEs will be growing fast through leadership in data-driven smart Industry 4.0 services; European Manufacturing SMEs will successfully compete globally with innovative products and services, digitised Industry 4.0 processes and innovative business models, involving their workforce at all levels in this Digital Transformation innovations. MISSION. The MIDIH 4.0 project aims at implementing the fast, dynamic, borderless, disruptive side of the I4MS innovation coin: technological services (interactive try-on demos, webinars, challenges, hackathons and awards) will be driven by young and dynamic ICT talents virtually meeting older and experienced manufacturing engineers in a one-stop-shop global marketplace; business services (ideas incubation, business acceleration, demand-offer matchmaking and brokerage, access to finance) will support SMEs, startups, web entrepreneurs as well as corporates in the delivery of innovative products and services, in accessing new markets, in fund-raising; skills building services (serious and role games, participative lessons and webinars, virtual experiments in physical teaching factories, professional courses for existing technicians as well as for executives) will not only help SMEs and corporates understand the new technologies, but also take full advantage of them, providing an operational framework that will stimulate trust, confidence and investments. The MIDIH project is an inclusive Innovation Action of 21 beneficiaries coming from 12 EU Countries, including, Competence Centers, Digital Innovation Hubs, CPS/IOT Technology Providers as well as Lighthouse Manufacturing Industries. A two-iteration Open Call will help achieve a critical mass of cross-border experiments.

Manufacturing represents approximately 21 % of the EU’s GDP and 20 % of its employment, providing more than 30 million jobs in 230 000 enterprises, mostly SMEs. Moreover, each job in industry is considered to be linked to two more in related services. European manufacturing is also a dominant element in international trade, leading the world in areas such as automotive, machinery and agricultural engineering. Already threatened by both the lower-wage economies and other high-tech rivals, the situation of EU companies was even made more difficult by the downturn. The Z-Fact0r consortium has conducted an extensive state-of-the-art research (see section 1.4) and realised that although a number of activities (see section 1.3) have been trying to address the need for zero-defect manufacturing, still there is a vast business opportunity for innovative, high-ROI (Return on Investment) solutions to ensure, better quality and higher productivity in the European manufacturing industries. The Z-Fact0r solution comprises the introduction of five (5) multi-stage production-based strategies targeting (i) the early detection of the defect (Z-DETECT), (ii) the prediction of the defect generation (Z-PREDICT), (iii) the prevention of defect generation by recalibrating the production line (multi-stage), as well as defect propagation in later stages of the production (Z-PREVENT), (iv) the reworking/remanufacturing of the product, if this is possible, using additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques (Z-REPAIR) and (v) the management of the aforementioned strategies through event modelling, KPI (key performance indicators) monitoring and real-time decision support (Z-MANAGE). To do that we have brought together a total of thirteen (13) EU-based partners, representing both industry and academia, having ample experience in cutting-edge technologies and active presence in the EU manufacturing.

Product-service solutions are not a novelty for manufacturing domain, in particular for Europe. Services are becoming more and more not just an optional adjunct to products, but they are integral part of manufacturing industries’ offer, able to differentiate the product value proposition, to take a significant part of the revenue stream and even to substitute the traditional selling of products with more innovative service-oriented business models. There are still 5 main obstacles which are currently preventing service innovation to be pervasively adopted by all EU manufacturing industries, SMEs included: I. Products and Services : How to preserve the specific characteristics of product and services in a value chain, without creating isolated and not interconnected walled gardens? II. Design and Manufacturing: How to reconcile Real World and Digital World in PLM allowing multi-directional interoperability of the digital images of the same product between design-manufacturing? III. Knowledge and Sentiment: How to consider both professional knowledge and crowd sentiments, trying to mediate extreme product-push and market-pull positions? IV. Service-Oriented and Event-Driven: How to create a generic conceptual and implementation framework which could identify and implement the interoperability points between SOA and EDA in PLM value chain systems? V. Business and Innovation: How to reconcile current profitable and competitive product-oriented business models with more intangible, risky, service-oriented and Internet-based businesses? PSYMBIOSYS aims at improving the competitiveness of European Manufacturing industries by developing an innovative product-service engineering environment, symbolized by a five-pointed symbiosis star – design-production, product-service, knowledge-sentiment, EDA-SOA, business-innovation – and able to dramatically reduce the time-to-market of more attractive and sustainable product-service solutions.