Numerous methods, systems and tools exist to facilitate production management, optimise resource utilisation and increase process efficiency. With an increasing focus on sustainability, complexity grows even further as production supervisors have to manage energy and materials consumption, carbon footprints and waste output as well as traditional key performance indicators such as process efficiency, use of assets, quality, scrape rate and overall costs. Efforts to find the optimum levels for yield, quality, speed and energy consumption often result in individualised rates for each area, which is far from the ideal. The ‘Production Logistics and Sustainability Cockpit’ (PLANTCockpit) research project aims to incorporate existing enterprise resource planning systems, as well as MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and special-purpose solutions. They provide the integration of visibility and process needed to be able to actually identify potential and optimise intralogistics processes with respect to yield, quality, energy consumption and other such indicators. The project team’s vision is to offer PLANTCockpit to manufacturing communities as the central environment for monitoring and controlling all intra-logistical processes. The research project aims to supply production supervisors, foremen and line managers with the required visibility to make well-informed decisions for optimising plant processes. PLANTCockpit plans to provide a model for integrating heterogeneous shop floor management systems, including enterprise resource planning, condition-based maintenance, energy management and other special-purpose systems. It will focus on defining standard interfaces and a reference model for incorporating the most prominent manufacturing processes. Current shop floor integration standards, such as ISA 95, OAGIS, OPC Unified Architecture and MTConnect will be used as starting points. The consortium includes world-leading system providers, influential academic partners and prominent end-users.

Web resources:	https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/95580/factsheet/en
Start date:	01-09-2010
End date:	31-08-2013
Total budget - Public funding:	12 711 558,00 Euro - 7 979 682,00 Euro
Call topic:	Smart Factories: ICT for agile and environmentally friendly manufacturing (FoF.ICT.2010.10.1)