H2020 DIGITbrain project, funded by EC under the Grant Agreement number 952071, includes Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) under two Open Calls. DIGITbrain has the ambition to transform the CloudiFacturing Solution and ecosystem (developed in the H2020 CloudiFacturing Project) towards the requirements of Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS), utilising the Digital Brain and its underlying technology components as the main innovation of the project.   

This Open Call is focused on attracting Third Parties (especially manufacturing and ISV SMEs and mid-caps) to perform experiments to validate the DIGITbrain solution and to make SMEs more competitive by transferring innovative solutions into the wider manufacturing community.  Experiments will be implemented in close collaboration with Digital Innovation Hubs and technical partners of Competence Centers. This interaction should start during proposal preparation, with DIHs and technical partners of competence centers acting as business and technical supporters for applicants. This collaboration will then continue during the experiments’ deployment and execution.

Key Call Details

Project full name: Digital twins bringing agility and innovation to manufacturing SMEs, by empowering a network of DIHs with an integrated digital platform that enables Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS)

Project acronym: DIGITbrain 

Call identifier: DIGITbrain – OC2

Project grant agreement number: 952071

Call opening:  28th February 2022, 10:00h (CET Time)

Submission Deadline:  31st May 2022, 17:00h (CEST Time)

Expected duration of participation in experiments: 12 months 

Total EC funding available for Third Parties in DIGITbrain-OC2: up to 684.600 EUR financial support for Third Parties is available to support 7 experiments. DIGITbrain considers that proposals requesting a contribution up to 97,800 EUR per experiment would allow the specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Maximum amount of financial support for each Third Party: 60,000 EUR

Language in which proposal should be submitted: English 

Weblink for further information (full call text/proposal guidelines/call results) on the official project website: https://digitbrain.eu

Email address for further information: opencall@digitbrain.eu

Expectations for Experiments

Grounding on the Digital Twin concept, experiments will be focused on enabling the customization of Industrial Products (intended as systems operated by manufacturing companies to support the production of the final consumer products) and facilitating cost-effective distributed and localised production for manufacturing SMEs or mid-caps, by leveraging edge, cloud and HPC-based modelling, simulation, optimisation, analysis, and machine learning tools. Experiments can cover any segments in the manufacturing sector at large, including (but not limited to) discrete manufacturing, continuous production, or construction.

Experiments should aim at covering the development and uptake of digital technologies especially in segments where these are underexploited. 

An experiment consortium has to meet the following requirements:

1. The minimum number of partners in an experiment consortium must include:
   • One End User (mainly SMEs); and
   • One Technical partner acting as Independent Software Vendor (ISV), engineering or software consultant.
2. All Third Parties must come from European Member States, Associated Countries or the United Kingdom [1].
3. According to the EC rules, no Third Party is allowed to have received more than 100,000 EUR from Horizon 2020 I4MS and SAE Open Calls [2].

DIGITbrain Project, which is funded by the EU Research and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020, aims to enable small and medium-sized European manufacturing companies (SMEs & mid-caps) to benefit from AI-based Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS). In its first Open Call from March 2021 to June 2021 the project will accept new applicants and support the implementation of seven industrial use cases in the field of manufacturing with up to 100K Euros.

DIGITbrain in a nutshell

The Digital Brain is a completely novel concept that extends the Digital Twin to cover the full lifecycle of industrial products and thereby expands it to a smart entity having analysis and decision support capabilities. By having access to on-demand data, models, algorithms, and resources for industrial products the "Digital Product Brain" will, enable their customisation and adaptation according to very individual conditions and thus, facilitate the implementation of Manufacturing as a Service for SMEs. This will not only accelerate adaptation of manufacturing and products to changing conditions, and enable personalized manufacturing in an affordable way, but also facilitate cost-effective distributed and localised production, allowing them to access advanced manufacturing facilities within their regions or to distribute their orders across different ones.

Apply for the project until the end of June 2021 with your industrial use case and join a Pan-European Team that helps solving it!

In its lifetime the project will implement 21 highly innovative experiments, each bringing together suitable manufacturing end-users, technology providers, research organisations, High Performance Computing providers or Digital Innovation Hubs, in order to implement an individual use case-based Digital Twin.

Who can apply?

Companies from the above mentioned groups, located in the EU, a Horizon 2020 associated country or the UK, can apply in one of the two Open Calls, with their specific use case. Experiments can cover all segments of the entire manufacturing sector, e.g. discrete manufacturing, continuous production or construction. In its first Open Call, open from 31st March 2021 to 30th June 2021, it will add 7 new experiments, eligible by up to 100K Euros each. The experiments will be integrated to a Digital Marketplace, which provides the necessary graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in view of configuring and monitoring the Digital Brain for an industrial-product instance and will handle the access rights to the Digital Brain’s instances.

The Project is funded by the EU Research and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020 under grant agreement number 952071 and currently composed of a consortium of 36 partners.

DIGITbrain Open Call Details:

• DIGITbrain will be running 2 Open Calls for experiments all over Europe with a budget of: 1 400 000 € which you can apply to
  • 1st Open Call: From March 2021 to June 2021
  • 2nd Open Call: From March 2022 to June 2022
• 7 application experiments will be accepted in every Open Call and receive
  • up to 100K Euros per experiment
  • up to 60K Euros (possible) per third party

DIGITbrain Open Call timeline

• Opening date: March 31st, 2021 - 10:00h (CEST Time)
• Proposal submission deadline: June 30th, 2021 - 17:00h (CEST Time)
• Proposal evaluation phase: from June 30th to the end of September 2021
• Announcement of accepted proposals: September 2021
• Support throughout the process (application, design and implementation of the experiment) by the participating Digital Innovation Hubs.
• Begin of implementation phase: October 2021