To meet requirements of mass customisation, the manufacturers of machines and equipment for production of mass customised products need powerful engineering environments to allow for multi-directional exchange of knowledge between product design, service design and manufacturing, as well as customers and other relevant organisations across the value chain, distributed all over the globe. Specifically they need feedback from their business customers to whom they sell their equipment, as well as from the final-product customers. Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) provides new possibilities for collaborative design of product-services within such distributed enterprise, easily adaptable to highly dynamically changing conditions under which enterprises are developing and manufacturing their product-services. On the other hand, tremendous experiences in social software solutions offer new opportunities for enterprises to capture and share experienced based knowledge among all actors across the value chain. Such enormous amount of knowledge to be gathered and shared under dynamically changing conditions, with wide spectrum of actors involved, having different expertise and working conditions/cultures, ask for effective context sensitive solutions for knowledge capturing and analysis. The objective of DIVERSITY is to create a new product-service engineering environment based on a combination of CMfg, PDM/PLM and social software, as well as a set of software tools to support real time sharing of knowledge among various actors, from the designer up to the customer, aimed at small and medium sized companies producing machines/equipment for mass product manufacturers. A new methodology for concurrent collaborative product-service design applying lean based product design paradigm will be developed. Three manufacturing companies, delivering machines/equipment in three different mass production sectors, will drive the project development.

The European manufacturing industry faces new challenges, which are currently not addressed by today’s products and systems. Most of the products are still in essence ‘simple’ in nature, with no capability for adapting to the consumers’ needs and no integrated methods exist for the holistic acquisition and processing of feedback information emanating from product-services. ICP4Life proposes an integrated, collaborative platform for the design, development and support of product-service systems for SMEs, equipment manufacturers and energy suppliers in order to maximize the impact in the European industry. The proposed platform comprises of three main components. The first component demonstrates a collaborative web-based application for the creation and management of products and services by engineers and designers of multiple disciplines. The second component is a Product-Service configuration tool for customers, enabling the easy and intuitive formation of Products and Services. The same component will be used for managing product related data pertaining to the manufacturer, supplier and the customer. The third component will support the efficient, adaptive and responsive planning and decision making phases, for managing the dynamic operation of the plants and the supply chain. All the components will be compatible with open standards, such as AutomationML, in order to make the most out of and accelerate the adoption by the European industry. The ICP4Life project will address the current needs of today’s manufacturers, providing faster design of modular equipment and components, the seamless collaboration of engineers across a wider network of companies as well as within a single company with disperse engineering offices and production sites and the reuse of knowledge regarding both products and processes for new projects or the configuration of existing lines. The ICP4Life consortium consists of highly skilled organizations to ensure the success of this project.

The objective of MARKET4.0 is to define, develop and validate an open multi-sided marketplace, based on a trusted P2P data sharing infrastructure for Industry 4.0, that brings together Industrial Product Service Systems (IPSS) providers (supply side) and OEMs as their customers (demand side). It will allow direct interaction among the different sides to improve the sales power of production equipment SMEs. MARKET4.0 will offer advanced web-presence of production equipment SMEs extended by functionalities such as simulations, VR/AR capabilities and a P2P (Industrial Data Space) offering smart user-services and a secure API to try and test the Digital Twin of the production equipment, on top supplier and customer data. This will facilitate direct transactions between market peers (supplier-to-supplier, supplier-to-customer, customer-to-suppliers and more) during the entire B2B lifecycle, i.e. from equipment search to procurement and commissioning. MARKET4.0 will create trust in the business transactions between SME production equipment manufacturers and their customers, as an integral element of the Industrial Data Space (IDS) reference architecture. It includes technological trust (simulation before purchasing), financial trust (Blockchain distributed ledger technology for secure payment), delivery and (anonymized) feedback. In MARKET4.0 the supply side (mainly SMEs) may offer a) production equipment, b) services that extend the capabilities of the production equipment, c) production equipment as a service and d) collaborative engineering services. The marketplace will generate additional value by providing engineering services and acting as a mediator between suppliers and customers.