Manufacturing and logistics companies are subject to unforeseen events that disrupt the supply chain, causing production slowdowns, reduced output, and increased costs, making it difficult to meet customer demand. To mitigate these risks, manufacturers must build resilience across entire value chains. NARRATE will develop a sophisticated tool using AI, Digital Twin, and IoT technologies allowing end-to-end visibility and control over supply chain operations to monitor and predict potential disruptions, enabling supply chains to achieve improved resilience. The Intelligent Manufacturing Custodian (IMC) will leverage data from various production sources to enable proactive decision-making and act as a nerve centre for a supply-chain network, providing real-time monitoring and coordination of intelligent production processes and logistics. Integrating an IMC into a supply-chain will evolve its operations into Smart Manufacturing Network (SMN): a connected and self-orchestrated ecosystem linked end-to-end with programmable Manufacturing-as-a-Service capabilities that can withstand disruptions. A Digital Twin will provide a reliable model to represent production and operational data of an SMN to unlock deeper IMC intelligence. Collected data will train machine learning models to predict potential disruptions, such as natural disasters or delayed shipments. AI algorithms will analyse the data and provide real-time reporting and visualization on a dashboard. The IMC and Digital Twin interaction will generate powerful insights and self-adapting abilities that support an SMN to evolve under human supervision by switching services between multiple external partners to respond to risks and disruptions and improve energy efficiency, product circularity and environmental sustainability across the entire production process. The effectiveness of NARRATE will be evaluated by testing the IMC in real production environments in quite diverse industry sectors.

Market trends show advanced usage of safety-critical systems with novel services based on smart data analytics. Customers require continuous updates to applications and services and seek lower cost (Bill-of-Material, BoM) and easy to install solutions (maintenance) for safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). To respond to these trends, TRANSACT will leverage edge and cloud technologies and establish business partner eco-systems to enhance safety-critical systems in regulated environments. TRANSACT will transform local safety critical CPS into distributed safety-critical CPS solutions with a heterogeneous architecture composed of components along a device-edge-cloud continuum. The distributed solutions incorporating data and cloud services will simplify the CPS devices, reducing their software footprint, and consequently their BoM and Lower of Cost or Market. Business-wise, system manufacturers thus transform to solution providers. To that end TRANSACT will research distributed reference architectures for safety-critical CPS that rely on edge and cloud computing. These architectures shall enable seamless mixing of on-device, edge and cloud services while assuring flexible yet safe and secure deployment of new applications, and independent releasing of edge and cloud-based components vs. on-device. Moreover, safety, performance, cybersecurity and privacy of data will be kept on the same level as on-device only safety-critical CPS architectures. By also integrating AI services into distributed CPS, TRANSACT will enable fast development of innovative value-based services and business models leading to faster market introduction in the various multi-billion euro markets addressed by TRANSACT. Encouraged by ARTEMIS' 2019 publication on embedded intelligence, TRANSACT will be a crucial enabler for Europe to shift towards a solution-oriented market "so as to still matter in the Embedded & Cyber-Physical Systems field of tomorrow’s world."