Digital and Green Transitions of the European Manufacturing Sector through beyond 5G-enabled technologies and innovations

Boosting green and digital manufacturing in Europe through smart CPSoS

what - Project Overview

Zero-enabling smart networked control framework for agile cyber physical production systems of systems (Zero-SWARM), is a project with a total public private investment of almost €10 million launched on the 1st June 2022, aiming to accelerate the uptake of advanced 5G technologies by European manufacturing sector. The project mission is to achieve climate neutral and digitized production via a multidisciplinary, human centric, objective oriented innovative approach resulting in technical solutions for open swarm framework, non-public 5G network, active information continuum and digital twin. In essence, it establishes a unique forum where separately maturing technologies of 5G and cloud-edge continuum, data technologies and analysis (including data spaces and GAIA-X) and operational technology (automation and agility) break their siloes to co-design and co-create through 10 trials.

Objectives

High Level Design & Gap Analysis

Objective 1: Realize an open framework for the engineering and management of smart CPSoS, relying on advanced industrial 5G communication, to enable resilience Zero-X manufacturing.

Objective 2: Gap analysis of the key operational, information, technologies, knowledge, competency and business features for a digital and green industrial revolution.

zero_swarm_graphic

Deep Study & Solution Development

Objective 3: Foster adoption of private industrial 5G as a major enabler of the Active Information Continuum (AIC) that provides advanced wireless connectivity integrated with distributed cloud-edge industrial computing for: i) ensuring adequate consideration of special requirements of 5G enabled CPSoS, such as time sensitive and deterministic networking, real timeoperation, reliability, etc.; ii) demonstrating a novel zero-touch network management model that simplifies the operation of the private 5G networks; iii) developing a 5G asset administration shell (AAS) to seamlessly integrate 5G system within the manufacturing assets.

Objective 4: Achieve a generic approach for distributed intelligent control applications that are aiming at portability, flexibility, reusability, interoperability, reconfiguration of distributed applications at the edge of shopfloor via a secure and trustworthy information continuum, enabling awareness in CPSoS built on top of an open, transparent and secure industrial cloud-edge continuum supporting data driven applications as well as discrete and composite digital twins required for smart manufacturing. The goal is to derive runtime intelligence on the cloudedge based data streams coming from the shop floor and to make low-latency decisions in response to changing conditions, with the ability to filter out data that are unnecessary for analysis before transferring them over the network to the cloud.

Objective 5: Develop and validate a secure, trustworthy and open toolkit to support distributed automation over the decentralised data and intelligence infrastructures. Exploiting both the IEC-61499 international standard for distributed control and its concepts as well as the OPC-UA information models, the project will develop and validate an open toolkit (OPC-UA server, client, information model, data model and secure 5G transport layer) to support ZeroSWARM CPSoS.

Validation & Demonstration

Objective 6: Test, validate, and demonstrate the ZeroSWARM identified trials. Each demonstration focuses on end-to-end proof of concept of the envisioned solutions and their KPI quantification as defined in the project. Trials will be carried out in the large scale demonstration testbeds targeting TRLs 6-7.

Impact & Synergy

Objective 7: Maximize the project impact and outreach to foster Zero-SWARM solutions up-take reinforcing the European industry competitiveness and its environmental, economic and social sustainability to fulfil leadership, resilience and sovereignty.

Why - The Green Digital Transformation

Green Digital Transformation or Green Digitalization is the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual operations with automated processes or replacing older technology with newer digital ones, aiming for sustainable production. Saturated markets and the continuous need for lowering the costs drive the evolution of manufacturing sector towards a modular and networked smart factories in reply to the trend towards an individualized customer driven mass-production. To accelerate digitalization of industries while supporting emerging paradigm shift towards green production, Zero-SWARM aims a number of new technologies and innovative solutions to achieve tomorrow’s 5G-enabled green and digital manufacturing.

Shopfloor trial nodes

A rich number of testing facilities (16) in 3 main nodes in Europe, North, Centre and South is provided. They are existing facilities with prior private and/or public European, national or regional investment. We plan to deliver at least 10 trials over them, each of which focuses on end to-end proof of concept of the envisioned solutions and their KPI quantification as defined in the project. The project aims at the innovation sweet spot, looking for viable, feasible and desirable solutions by pursuing the following large scale demonstrations and trials.

Who - Zero Swarm Consortium

Zero-SWARM in line with the European Union prioritizes such as the Green Deal and a Europe fit for the digital age brings together 28 organizations from 10 European countries with complementary expertise and skills. The project partners are:

Community

The Zero-SWARM Community gathers a rich ecosystem of active members who interact, find synergies, and get value from a community of peers. The Community is the place to be constantly updated about the latest 5G solutions for the manufacturing sector developed by Zero-SWARM.

expression of interest

Join the 5G sprint with Zero-SWARM, and be among the first 6 companies to elevate your manufacturing game!

Blog

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Contact

Zero Swarm
Kateryna Kot
Community & Project Manager at IDSA

kateryna.kot@internationaldataspaces.org