DATA SPACES FOR FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION LINES AND SUPPLY CHAINS FOR RESILIENT MANUFACTURING

Manufacturing industries continuously face the challenge of delivering high-quality products under high production rates while minimizing non value-adding activities. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is causing manufacturers to rethink and reassess their global supply chains and the flexibility of their production sites. Resilience means the ability to withstand difficult situations, while flexibility can be considered as the ability to accommodate changes without incurring significant extra costs. Production processes demanding high human skill such as forming processes, requires readjustment of the process parameters of all production steps as a new product evolves. The deficiencies can be attributed largely to the lack of efficient ways for trusted data sharing among the stakeholders without interoperability barriers. There is a need to be able to determine when such changes lead to deterministic-chaotic behavior with far reaching consequences.

FLEX4RES provides an open platform to support production networks' reconfiguration for resilient manufacturing value chains. FLEX4RES will utilize platform-based manufacturing that builds on the state-of-the-art Gaia-X and IDS technologies for data-sharing in the horizontal supply chain and the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) that is to implement intra-factory reconfiguration practices. FLEX4RES considers the Digital Twin of the value-adding network a key enabling technology to achieve reconfiguration processes in highly flexible production systems and networks. The key element of technology linkage is represented by the Self-Descriptions with linked, standardized information models, especially in terms of resilience.

The developed platform and specialized hardware aim to improve the existing industry-established lean management approaches related to Reconfiguration Management through the digitalization of the production, characterized as Industry4.0, by allowing for the information sharing between value chain stakeholders.