EFPF

European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing

Smart Manufacturing

Project Vision

Manufacturing provides about 20% of all jobs in the European economy, generating a turnover of 7,000 billion Euros. However, changing market trends now require companies to respond rapidly to demands for highly customised products. In response, the Factories of the Future PPP within the Horizon2020 programme stimulated the creation of 10 digital platform projects aimed at developing Collaborative Manufacturing and Logistics solutions, but this also raised concerns over the risk of fragmentation.

Hence, the next stage in building a level playing field for SMEs and others to be able to access the benefits of digital automation without reliance on commercial, profit-led platforms, the EFPF project aims to federate 4 of the Digital Industrial Platforms into a single access portal. EFPF sees itself as a catalyst for an ecosystem of commercially viable, but smaller, platforms that partly compete and partly cooperate in order to deliver value to their customers. The EFPF platform will provide seamless, single-sign-on access to multiple industrial platforms, marketplaces and open-source tools for European manufacturers and developers.

Project Objectives

To create critical mass and momentum for a European Digital Industrial Ecosystem.
To enable the creation of ad-hoc collaborative networks to address dynamic market needs for mass-customisation and lot-size one manufacturing.
To integrate 4 existing base Industry 4.0 platforms.
To align the 4 existing marketplace functions into an open ecosystem.

IT Innovation's Role

Technical

To provide an intelligent cybersecurity risk assessment tool – the System Security Modeller (SSM) – to enable rigorous risk assessment and GDPR compliance and provide mitigation strategies.
To provide seamless single-sign-on user access
To ensure privacy and security, focussing particularly on data storage

Management