DIGICOR Decentralised Agile Coordination Across Supply Chains

Decentralised Agile Coordination Across Supply Chains

Summary

European manufacturing competes in a global knowledge-driven economy, and thus increasingly seeks competitive advantage through quality, agility and personalisation based on latest advances in IT. Increasing utilisation of IT in mission-critical elements of the production brings opportunities for consistency, transparency and flexibility, bringing the “lot size of 1” closer to reality even for mass-production industries. Most relevant to achieve the expected increase of production performance for highly customized products is to master the complexity of the supply chain and logistics in the global production networks. Ad-hoc collaboration and setup of production coalitions with a wide spectrum of suppliers and service providers is necessary to answer the customization wishes of customers for their individual products in short time, high quality, and at affordable costs. Innovations from small high-tech companies requested by customers have to be integrated into the traditional industrial processes using novel organisational concepts and setups. DIGICOR will address the development of a collaboration platform, tools, and services for the setup and coordination of production networks and in particular the integration of non-traditional, small, yet innovative companies (SMEs) and logistics providers into the supply chain of large manufacturers (OEMs). The solution is based on an open platform integrating tools and services and implementing case specific governance rules and procedures for collaboration, knowledge protection, and security. The open platform will provide services creating a marketplace for the collaboration partners, for planning and control of the collaborative production and the logistics and risk management. It will be open to third parties to add services for advanced analytics, simulation, or optimization etc. The platform will provide seamless connectivity to the automation solutions, smart objects, and real-time data sources across the network.

More information

Website:	www.digicor-project.eu
Duration:	36 months
Start date:	01-10-2016
End date:	30-09-2019
Number of participants:	12
Total budget - EC contribution:	7993819 Euro - 7993819 Euro
Call topic:	Digital automation - Collaborative manufacturing and logistics (FoF.2016.11-i)
Instrument:	Collaborative project (generic)

Location

Characteristics

Impact (Performance - People - Planet - Future Products) - (2) view

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Social sustainability

Human aspects

Human-machine interaction

Comment: DIGICOR will offer operative support tools to support human-machine interactions in the production environment. Such tools will allow rescheduling at a fine-grained granularity (operations and human/non-human resources) to mitigate the impact of disruptive events. Moreover, the DIGICOR platform will offer human-centric interfaces for planning and operational control of collaborative activities. The interfaces of DIGICOR tools and services will also follow user-centric design approach.

Economic sustainability

Supply chain and value network efficiency

Comment: DIGICOR supports economic sustainability of small but innovative SMEs by enabling the to form agile supply networks that complete with large manufacturers or suppliers. The DIGICOR platform enable companies to identify suitable market opportunities (e.g. OEM tenders advertised on DIGICOR Marketplace) and address those opportunities by forming dynamic partnerships. The collaboration tools provided by the DIGICOR platform ensure complete visibility and governance of the collaborative activities being carried out across partner facilities in the network. By providing information about new business opportunities and allowing companies to participate in multiple supply networks, DIGICOR supports the economic sustainability of ambitious companies in the manufacturing domain.

Comment: External applications can communicate with OPC-UA based middleware (subject to authentication etc) to ingest data e.g. from factories

APIs and Integration Protocols

Comment: DIGICOR Toolstore can host external/standalone applications

Semantic/information interoperability

Comment: The communication middleware in the DIGICOR platform will be based on OPC-UA standard. In order to facilitate the flow of data to and from the middleware, the project will develop Data (harmonisation and transformation) Maps. The Data Maps will be offered as microservices to address the semantic and syntactic interoperability issues. In addition, standardised service interfaces will be defined to allow the discovery and enactment of services within the DIGICOR Platform.

Data/object model interoperability - Data exchange formats - APIs

Comment: Gateway (interfaces with external applications, built on top of middleware.

Application level interoperability

Comment: DIGICOR applications are developed as standalone plug-and-play tools with dedicated interfaces. External applications (e.g. production planning, schedulling, workflow management etc) can also be deployed on DIGICOR toolstore

Modular Design and Deployment Approaches

Comment: Docker based application packaging and deployment is adopted in DIGICOR

Open APIs and Communication Protocols

Comment: Communication with middleware is supported by open data model to be developed.

Platform level interoperability

User Acccess and Rights Management

Comment: KeyCloak based Identity and Access Management of platform of DIGICOR Platform

Authorisation and Authentication

Comment: KeyCloak - based on Standards (OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0)

Security

Comment: DIGICOR will develop holistic security and governance mechanisms to ensure the access, data transfer and collaborations are protected at the platform level. Some of the security mechanisms being developed in the project include: Advanced pairing-based cryptography (e.g., Attribute-Based Encryption-ABE), Semantic multi-aspect access and usage control, Security-aware workflow verification & adaptation for inherent compliance, Integration of security protocols with IPR management and adaptations of DRM technologies for document management

Standards, standardisation and regulation - (1) view

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Standards

Comment: The DIGIOR project adopts OPC UA interoperability standard for secure and reliable exchange of data in the industrial automation space. In addition to OPC UA, the project will reuse existing results/ontologies/data models for semantic interoperability coming from different standards (OASIS, etc.)

Business model aspects - (6) view

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Business model, added value and process focus of digital platform deployment

Comment: DIGICOR provides novel business opportunities to industrial associations or clusters, who are ideally positioned to offer DIGICOR Platform (with associated tools and services) under the PaaS model. Platform providers can offer DIGICOR platform as one-stop technological solutions that allow network members to advertise their tenders, find suitable partners, establish collaborative partnerships, formalise business contracts, share information and monitor the progress of distributed activities.

Business ecosystem

Comment: By providing an open ICT platform (with tools and services), DIGICOR contributes towards the development of an ecosystem that nurtures and supports the management and control of collaboration networks. Such an ecosystem also promotes the development, usage and uptake of advance technological solutions, thus contributing towards the advances in technology and skill set in a wider context.

Target clients

Comment: The target clients of DIGICOR Platform are the industry associations and SME clusters that traditionally provide the partner search, match making and facilitation of collaboration services. Although, the tools provided through the DIGICOR Tool Store can also be used by individual manufacturing companies to plan, monitor and optimise their production processes.

Other eco-system aspects

Comment: One of the aspects of DIGICOR ecosystem is the Tool Store, where software developers and service providers can offer their tools and services to DIGICOR users.

Data ownership - data governance - data liability

Comment: Governance rules and procedures for the collaboration in production networks

Data Liability