Athens Technology Center (ATC) has exploited once again its longstanding experience in the development and integration of software platforms and has been involved in the design of the H2020 E2COMATION project’s platform overall architecture, and in specific, for the infrastructural framework of the platform.
A few words about the project
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 the impact of the behavior of a factory across the 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 it’s strategic and sustainable positioning with respect to the complex supply and value chain it belongs to.
E2COMATION’s 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.
A few words about ATC’s activities within the last 6 months
During the second semester of 2021, in terms of the E2COMATION project, Athens Technology Center (ATC) linked together all industrial requirements related to Wood working and Food and Beverage value chains, leading to formulate business cases, validation scenarios, and KPIs to be monitored in the Pilot testbeds during the execution of the project.
In specific, ATC succeeded to provide the first release of validation scenarios and KPIs, demonstrating the scope of the end-users, and their targets on improvements they expect keeping in mind parameters currently monitored and parameters that should start being monitored from now on. These parameters were furthermore summarized, in order to provide initial input to the architecture of the E2COMATION platform, since user requirements will be included in the design of the system.
As a result of this effort, industrial requirements from the two value chains of interest to E2COMATION, namely Wood working and Food and Beverage value chains, have been analyzed and are going to be used as the roadmap to be followed within the project lifetime to evaluate user requirements and define the way to achieve the desired improvements. KPIs are also defined in an initial approach, in order to monitor important parameters of shopfloor operation, thus the end users have specified monitored parameters and the KPI values logged in the current situation for each industrial workplace and consequently the value that is targeted to achieve for every KPI.
Last but not least, business requirements have been collected as described by the end-users in the validation scenarios and defined KPIs which capture the desired parameters and provide initial input to create the software platform of E2COMATION.
