Due to the proliferation of ICT Technologies, manufacturing industry is undergoing substantial transformation in terms of HW but also in terms of Cyber-Physical Production Systems and the SW and services used within production environments. In parallel, the manufacturing processes of the future are changing and need to be highly flexible and dynamic in order to satisfy customer demands for, e.g. large series production, mass customization, or changing orders. To keep pace with the needs of the manufacturing industry of the future, in Manufacturing 4.0 companies need to flexibly react to these demands and be able to offer production capacities in a rapid way. Thus companies looking for manufacturing capacity need to be supported by the means to find these capacities, configure them, and integrate them into their own manufacturing processes. To achieve this, one obvious approach is to port successful concepts from the field of Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) and Cloud computing to manufacturing to mirror agile collaboration through flexible and scalable manufacturing processes: • Leasing and releasing manufacturing assets in an on-demand, utility-like fashion • Rapid elasticity through scaling leased assets up and down if necessary • Pay-per-use through metered service Applying these principles, Cloud manufacturing can move manufacturing processes from production-oriented to service-oriented networks by modelling single manufacturing assets as services in a similar way as SaaS or PaaS solutions. By modelling all process steps and manufacturing assets as services it is possible to realize cross-organization manufacturing orchestrations and integrate distributed resources and ultimately manufacture products more efficiently. While the theoretical foundations for Cloud manufacturing are manifest there are no proven tools and technologies exist in the market - CREMA aims to change this fact by providing Cloud-based Rapid Elastic Manufacturing based on SaaS and Cloud model

SHAREWORK‘s main objective is to endow an industrial work environment of the necessary “intelligence” and methods for the effective adoption of Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) with not fences, providing a system capable of understanding the environment and human actions through knowledge and sensors, future state predictions and with the ability to make a robot act accordingly while human safety is guaranteed and the human-related barriers are overcome. SHAREWORK will develop the needed technology for facing the new production paradigm compiling the necessary developments in a set of modular hardware, software and procedures to face different HRC applications in a systematic and effective way. A knowledge base (KB) to include system “know-how” data as well as real-time environment information is developed. An environment run-time perception and cognition updates this KB with object detection, human tracking and task identification. A human-aware dynamic task planning system will react based on previous knowledge and environment status by reassigning tasks and/or reconfiguring robot control. This data will allow robot intelligent motion planners to control robots while safety is ensured by a continuous ergonomics and risk assessment module to face a safety-productivity trade-off. A multimodal human-robot communication system will provide interfaces for bidirectional communication between operator and robot. Finally, methods for overcoming human-related barriers and data reliability and security concerning the entire framework are applied for a successful integration in the industry. SHAREWORK technology will be demonstrated in four different industrial cases: for railway, automotive, mechanical machining and equipment goods sectors. The usability of the developed HRC solutions in different industrial sectors and company sizes will increase productivity, flexibility, and reduce human stress, to support the workers and to strengthen European industry.

The overall concept of MANTIS is to provide a proactive maintenance service platform architecture based on Cyber Physical Systems that allows to estimate future performance, to predict and prevent imminent failures and to schedule proactive maintenance. Maintenance is no longer a necessary evil that costs what it costs, but an important function that creates additional value in the business process as well as new business models with a stronger service orientation. Physical systems (e.g. industrial machines, vehicles, renewable energy assets) and the environment they operate in, are monitored continuously by a broad and diverse range of intelligent sensors, resulting in massive amounts of data that characterise the usage history, operational condition, location, movement and other physical properties of those systems. These systems form part of a larger network of heterogeneous and collaborative systems (e.g. vehicle fleets or photovoltaic and windmill parks) connected via robust communication mechanisms able to operate in challenging environments. MANTIS consists of distributed processing chains that efficiently transform raw data into knowledge while minimising the need for bandwidth. Sophisticated distributed sensing and decision making functions are performed at different levels in a collaborative way, ranging from local nodes to locally optimise performance, bandwidth and maintenance; to cloud-based platforms that integrate information from diverse systems and execute distributed processing and analytics algorithms for global decision making. The research addressed in MANTIS will contribute to companies' assets availability, competitiveness, growth and sustainability. Use cases will be the testing ground for the innovative functionalities of the proactive maintenance service platform architecture and for its future exploitation in the industrial world. Results of MANTIS can be utilised directly in several industry areas and different fields of maintenanance.