E2COMATION

Improving industrial energy efficiency at European Manufacturing level requires the integration of energy data with advanced optimization techniques to guide a company decision making.

E2COMATION intends to address the optimization of energy usage, at multiple hierarchical layers of a manufacturing process as well as considering the whole life-cycle perspective across the value chain. To this purpose, it aims at providing a cross-sectorial methodological framework and a modular technological platform to monitor, predict, evaluate impact of the behavior of a factory across energy and the life-cycle assessment dimensions, in order to adapt and optimize dynamically not only its real-time behavior over different time-scales, but also its strategic and sustainable positioning with respect to the complex supply and value chain it belongs to.

Its major objectives are:

• Holistic analysis of energy-related data streams for production performance forecasting;
• Life-cycle conceptual paradigm applied to digital twinning of factory assets;
• Factory-level integrated multi-objective optimization architecture;
• Modular and scalable automation platform for distributed monitoring and supervision;
• Comprehensive simulation environment enhanced with energy and environmental performance;
• Energy Aware Planning and Scheduling tool (EAP&S);
• Life Cycle Assessment and Costing tool (LCAC) integrated in a company Decision Support System;
• Sustainable Computer Aided Process Planning (s-CAPP);
• LCA-driven supply chain management (SCM) and business ecosystem.

For E2COMATION to be successful, it is fundamental that the effectiveness of its methodological approach and technological framework is proved in complex industrial scenarios, involving several factories of different sectors. This will be achieved by implementing the project platform in 2 completely different value chains, the food and drink one and the woodworking one, with 5 concurrent industrial use-cases.

The E2COMATION project is a collaboration between 18 partners in 9 countries:
CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE (Italy) that is coordinating the project, NXTCONTROL GMBH (Austria), SYNESIS-SOCIETA CONSORTILE A RESPONSABILITA LIMITATA (Italy), SIMPLAN AG (Germany), ACT OPERATIONS RESEARCH IT SRL (Italy), SIGMATOOLS GMBH (Switzerland), KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN (Belgium), SOFTWARE AG (Germany), THINKING ADDITIVE LTD (UK), Athens Technology Centre S.A (Greece), INSTITUTO TECNOLOGICO METALMECANICO, MUEBLE, MADERA, EMBALAJE Y AFINES-AIDIMME (Spain), SCUOLA UNIVERSITARIA PROFESSIONALE DELLA SVIZZERA ITALIANA (Switzerland), OCME SRL (Italy), MAHOU SA (Spain), CONDIS SUPERMERCATS SA (Spain), KASTAMONU ENTEGRE AGAC SANAYI VE TICARET ANONIM SIRKETI (Turkey), ROYO SPAIN SL (Spain) and SCM GROUP SPA (Italy).

Thanks to its extensive experience in platforms that sustain data analysis applications, ATC will focus its major activities in E2COMATION on:

• Support to the design of the overall architecture for the infrastructural framework of the platform;
• Design and development of the distributed stream computing middleware;
• Integration with the IEC-61499 platform;
• Support to the integration of the data analysis tools;
• Deployment over the edge-to-cloud computing infrastructure;

The project started in November 2020 and will last for 42 months.