Manufacturing is the driving force behind Europe’s economy, providing over €6,553 billion of GDP. Against a background of climate change legislation, volatile energy prices, and increased environmental awareness, modern manufacturing must encompass a focus on sustainability and eco-efficiency. Given the current economic situation, this has to be achieved without the need for large capital expenditure. The application of information technologies to an already-existing production facility is a cost-effective investment. KAP stands for knowledge of past performance and awareness of the present state, enabling the prediction of future outcomes. By creating transparency through the usage of data generated on the shop floor, every existing resource can be used as efficiently as possible. This guarantees the effective coordination of man, machine, material, and method. In order to achieve this, the KAP research project will focus on production performance indicator definitions, including aspects of sustainability and energy-efficiency. Techniques such as complex event processing and data stream analysis will compute these indicators on-the-fly to provide effective real-time monitoring. Data mining in combination with OLAP can support problems with diagnosis and resolution. Perceptually efficient visualisations will communicate the production performance indicators to decision-makers in a format which can help reduce cognitive workload and effectively aid improvments of situational awareness. Within the research project, a well-balanced consortium of research centres and academic as well as industry partners provides the ideal opportunity to develop research outcomes proposed in the project. The research partners estimate reductions of over 5% per annum in waste and energy and 10% in time to market if the research prototype is potentially used in the future.

Web resources:	http://www.kap-project.eu https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/95347/factsheet/en
Start date:	01-09-2010
End date:	31-08-2013
Total budget - Public funding:	12 827 466,00 Euro - 7 545 000,00 Euro
Call topic:	Smart Factories: ICT for agile and environmentally friendly manufacturing (FoF.ICT.2010.10.1)