Fortissimo 2 will drive the uptake of advanced modelling, simulation and data analytics by European engineering and manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps. Such an uptake will deliver improved design processes, better products and services, and improved competitiveness. For the European Union as a whole this means improved employment opportunities and economic growth. The importance of advanced ICT to the competitiveness of both large and small companies in the engineering and manufacturing domain is well established. Despite early successes in this area, there are still many barriers to the uptake of such solutions, not least of which are the initial cost and complexity of adoption, particularly in the context of challenging trading conditions. This proposal targets the ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) action line (Phase 2) and builds on Phase 1 of that initiative. Phase 2 addresses the adoption of next generation ICT advances in the manufacturing domain. At the core of Fortissimo 2 are three tranches of Application Experiments (~35 in total). An initial set is included in this proposal and two further sets will be obtained through Open Calls for proposals. These experiments will be driven by the requirements of first-time users (predominately SMEs) and will bring together actors from across the value chain, from cycle providers to domain experts via the Fortissimo Marketplace. This will enable innovative solutions to manufacturing challenges, leading to new and improved design processes, products and services. A key feature of Fortissimo 2 will be the adaption of the Marketplace to meet the needs of end-users. It will offer a responsive and reliable service to companies which want to access HPC and Big resources and expertise. Fortissimo 2 initially involves 732 months of effort, a total cost of €11.1m and EC funding of €10m over a duration of three years, commensurate with achieving its ambitious goals.

The Airframe ITD aims at re-thinking and developing the technologies as building blocks and the “solution space” on the level of the entire or holistic aircraft: pushing aerodynamics across new frontiers, combining and integrating new materials and structural techniques – and integrating innovative new controls and propulsion architectures with the airframe; and optimizing this against the challenges of weight, cost, life-cycle impact and durability.

The aim of the project PHAROS is the development, implementation and demonstration of a fully instrumented, automated and simulation-enabled engineering software platform capable to automate the whole manual model-based systems engineering (MBSE) design process for physical systems architecture generation and optimisation, under special consideration of (but not limited to) automated optimal packaging, piping and routing generation of an aircraft wing section assembly which complies to a given set of engineering constraints. In order to achieve this, graph-based design languages in UML (Unified Modeling Language) are used to develop an automated, algorithmic implementation of interoperable engineering services for packaging, piping and routing. Design languages are executable in the software platform Design Compiler 43 of one industrial project partner and may be coupled for optimization purposes with the optimizer software Optimus of the other industrial partner. Graph-based design languages are inspired by human languages, in which the vocabulary and rules form a grammar. The term 'design language' means that every sentence allowed by the grammar is a valid expression of a design. The term 'graph-based' means that each node in a graph is used to represent a requirement, a function, a solution principle, a component or any other arbitrary engineering expression one may encounter in the product life-cycle. This graphical representation of the design product and design process in form of a graph-based language is translated by a compiler into the disciplinary models of packaging, piping and routing in order to draw conclusions for the further optimization of the designs. The automation of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) with a machine-executable V-Model will push the competitiveness of European aerospace companies to a new level of efficiency and will permit a unique selling proposition of innovation and cost leadership enabled by automation.