EPES system ICT platform

EPES system, the set of ICT tools, together with the methodology enable the manufacturing companies to enter a continuous process of upgrading their products, along with their life cycle, within the frame of the Virtual Factory and PPS concept through a configurable and adaptable set of services. The key components of the EPES solution include, as shown in Figure: • Virtual Collaborative Network Module: Serves as a Virtual Factory Infrastructure, enabling Business Process Interoperability support, Business Optimization Opportunities Tracking (BOOT), as well as Eco-constraints and Objectives Tracking. These functionalities are supported by a content repository component, text mining suite for documents stored in the repository (for discovering important words, association rules, similarity among documents, classifying documents), and workflow component • Service Generator Module: Provides a service runtime infrastructure for EPES, enabling the creation, configuration and re-configuration of deployable services and the extraction of the context-related information, needed to assure context sensitivity of the services generated/configured by the EPES solution. It interacts with all the other modules (using CMIS for the VCN and the RESTful APIs of the DMM and SM), providing an intelligent middleware for the EPES solution • Decision Making Module: Helps decision makers to use data and models to identify and solve problems through a decision making process; it is based on a Multi Objective Optimization platform and exposes its methods through a RESTful API. It is split into two modules of its own: the optimization module and the data analysis module • Simulation Module: Responsible for providing capabilities for automated execution of pre-defined simulations or other computational processes on data that resides in the Virtual Factory Knowledge Database (VFKDB). The simulation module is integrated with the DMM optimization features and provides services for automating the management of workflow and optimization plan definitions on the Multi Objective Optimization platform. The SM enables the integration of a wide variety of simulation software tools that can be executed without user intervention.