The research project Flex4Res is part of the project ecosystem around EuProGigant, which focuses on data spaces to exchange and use data from production securely and sovereignly.

The five research and innovation projects AMIDS, DIONE-X, ESCOM, EuProGigant and Flex4Res have joined forces to build on their findings. For the first time, representatives from all five projects came together at the EuProGigant Open House Day 2023 to discuss data sharing and common data usage in the European manufacturing industry. Held in mid-October in Berlin, the event embraced the motto “Connect. Share. Synergise.” and facilitated the exchange of insights among experts from research, large companies and SMEs. Additionally, the projects offered insights into their ongoing developments.

Together towards a common ecosystem

What started as an Austrian-German project for the manufacturing sector in 2021 became a Gaia-X lighthouse project in 2022: EuProGigant. Now, it has evolved into a pioneering project ecosystem on data spaces and services that comprises the five research and innovation projects AMIDS, DIONE-X, ESCOM, EuProGigant and Flex4Res.

All projects are united by the same vision: to establish a resilient, data-driven and sustainable ecosystem that fosters global leadership of the European manufacturing industry.

“Flex4Res focuses on the resilience of supply chains and brings an international perspective to the project ecosystem. Together, the ecosystem’s projects will make sure that SMEs can also benefit from data captured along the whole supply chain,” stated Kosmas Alexopoulos, Senior Research Engineer at Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems & Automation (LMS).

The goal of the ecosystem is to demonstrate how data can support the industrial value-creation process while describing the benefits of data-driven business models. Driven by around 100 industry and research partners, the projects address highly relevant topics in a total of 15 industry-driven use cases, for example:

• How can we reduce the CO2 footprint in manufacturing to achieve net zero?
• How can Artificial Intelligence support production processes to increase efficiency?
• How can supply chains be reconfigured to increase resilience?

All use cases require that data is shared along the supply and value chains. That is where the data spaces come into play: By implementing Gaia-X principles, the ecosystem enables production companies to make the best use of their data and share them with others – securely and sovereignly.

Connect. Share. Synergise.

Representatives from the five projects met with representatives from funding authorities, the industry and politics as well as experts from various SMEs at the EuProGigant Open House Day 2023. Participants conducted a comprehensive review of the projects’ achievements and exchanged about the future developments of the research and innovation initiatives. Four European Gaia-X hubs also shared insights into their activities for manufacturing companies, especially SMEs.

A highlight of the event were demonstrators from the projects. They made Gaia-X and the use cases of the five research projects tangible for participants and served to illustrate results. Flex4Res showed the demonstrator for the use case with voestalpine High-Performance Metals DIGITAL SOLUTIONS GmbH. This use case is about the reconfiguration of manufacturing processes during production. It demonstrates the highly flexible production planning and scheduling, also depending on the current machine state. The solution that will be developed allows for reconfiguring the manufacturing processes during production.

Further information about the EuProGigant Open House Day can be found here: https://www.flex4res.eu/euprogigant-open-house-day-2023/.