General Information about the Open Calls

CloudiFacturing - Cloudification of Production Engineering for Predictive Digital Manufacturing - is a European Innovation Action (IA) in the framework of Factories of the Future (FoF) with the mission of optimizing production processes and producibility, using Cloud/HPC-based modelling and simulation, and leveraging online factory data with advanced data analytics; thus, contributing to the competitiveness and resource efficiency manufacturing companies, especially SMEs. To pursue this mission, computationally demanding production engineering and simulation as well as data analytics tools are to be provided as cloud services to ease accessibility and make their use more affordable.

CloudiFacturing is a project, which is open to new (teams of) participants (3rd parties). With our Open Calls, we were looking for innovative use cases in the context of the project’s mission. The use cases had to clearly state their industrial impact for the involved manufacturing companies, based on their expected benefit from exploiting computational engineering and production services and workflows powered by the CloudiFacturing technology. Those application experiments are dedicated sub-projects with one-year duration that are executed within the scope of CloudiFacturing.

Two Open Calls have been successfully carried out and the third wave of CloudiFacturing Experiments from the 2nd Open Call has just started their work.

Selection Process of Our Open Calls

We especially welcomed use cases that:

1. Simulated manufacturing processes or manufacturing tools

2. leveraged factory data to learn from it, and

3. optimised manufacturing processes and/or manufacturability of goods.

The use cases needed to be driven by the end user; in other words, a manufacturing company, preferably an SME.
Small consortia consisting of 2 to 5 multidisciplinary partners (e.g. end users from the manufacturing sector, independent software vendors - ISVs, engineering consultants, research organizations, HPC providers, Digital Innovation Hubs) had the opportunity to propose use cases from different manufacturing sectors to be executed within the framework of CloudiFacturing. The minimum number of third parties (partners in the experiment consortium) in an Application Experiment was one end user and one ISV. The experiment consortium had to be cross-border meaning that third parties had to be located in different European countries or associated countries. End users should (preferably) have been new to the technology being investigated in the experiment; being new to EC projects has also been highly welcome. Proposals with a high ratio of SMEs (or mid-caps) and participants from new member states were particularly appreciated.

Selected proposers (third parties) will now have the opportunity

• to investigate and gather experience with HPC/Cloud Computing technologies for their use case;
• to explore technical benefits, e.g. better assessment of the producibility and production process optimization by more accurate simulation results using HPC/Cloud resources;
• to exploit information discovered in factory data to improve processes;
• to assess Cloud-­‐based business settings and their impact; and
• to leverage the CloudiFacturing Digital Marketplace being developed as a new distribution channel.

What does CloudiFacturing offer?

• Vendor independent Cloud infrastructure already containing engineering and simulation applications and services on which new experiments can be built to extend the range of service offerings via the CloudiFacturing Digital Marketplace.
• A tailored HPC/Cloud infrastructure (with a contractual environment protecting IPR).
• Independent evaluation of experiments against your requirements.
• Experiences from more than 30 experiments
• Consultancy on business models.
• Participation in the I4MS ecosystem (www.i4ms.eu).

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