The ProRegio project aims at developing a manufacturing intelligence based product-service that will rigorously change the current way how customer requirements are addressed by manufacturing companies. The development of this new business approach is based on three major issues, namely (i) design of customer oriented product-services for frugal innovation in a bottom-up development process, (ii) optimization of production systems and networks based on interaction of stakeholders, and (iii) planning and control of production networks and regional production systems to enable ad-hoc re-design. The three goals are enabled by innovative cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions integrating production (shop-floor and supplier) as well as customer feedbacks using open IT-platforms and advanced multi-objective optimization methods in comprehensive decision support tools. The application of the proposed methodology in any kind of globally engaging manufacturing company exploits potentials to shorten time-to-market of customized products as well as throughput times in globally distributed production tasks and reduce carbon footprint of global production networks. The integration of the proposed innovative product-service into production networks will increase the attractiveness of European companies by offering new added value services that make their products more attractive (e.g. more individualized products and shorter time to market) to different customers segments especially for emerging regions by offering new frugal products earning a share of sales and by increasing customer satisfaction in terms of providing more power to the customer. In general, ProRegio enables EU companies to export into emerging countries all around the world; in doing so the project will help to stabilize EU’s export growth above 5% until 2020.

The main objectives of this project are to develop a model-based prognostics method integrating the FMECA and PRM approaches for the smart prediction of equipment condition, a novel MDSS tool for smart industries maintenance strategy determination and resource management integrating ERP support, and the introduction of an MSP tool to share information between involved personnel. The proposers' approach is able to improve overall business effectiveness with respect to the following perspectives: • Increasing Availability and then Overall Equipment Effectiveness through increasing of MTBF, and reduction of MTTR and MDT. • Continuously monitoring the criticality of system components by performing/updating the FMECA analysis at first implementation or whenever a variation in the system design or composition occurs. • Building physical-based models of the components which have a higher criticality level or which status is difficult to monitor. • Determining an optimal strategy for the maintenance activities. • Creating a new schedule for the production activities that will optimize the overall system performance through a Smart Scheduling tool ensuring collaboration among the MDSS, the ERP and the RUL Estimation tool. • Providing, in addition to traditional data acquisition and management functions in a machine condition monitoring system, robust and customizable data analysis services by a cloud-based platform. • An Intra Factory Information Service will be developed to allow the company staff to be quickly informed of changes in the machine tool performances and to easily react to eventual production and maintenance activities rescheduling. The production and maintenance schedule of complete production lines and entire plants will run with real-time flexibility in order to perform at the required level of efficiency, optimize resources and plan repair interventions.

In nearly every sector of industrial manufacturing polishing techniques are used. But often manual polishing is the only option because the tasks are too complex to be automated. Therefore in SYMPLEXITY Symbiotic Human-Robot Solutions for Complex Surface Finishing Operations will be developed. The main SYMPLEXITY Objectives are SO 1 – Accurate and cognitive industrial robot systems enabling safe human-robot collaboration for surface finishing operations SO 2 – Easy to use interfaces for planning, control and re-planning of shared finishing tasks SO 3 – Collaboration oriented process technology for abrasive finishing, laser and fluid jet polishing SO 4 – Integrated and autonomous sensing system for objective identification of surface properties SO 5 – Introduction of developed collaborative finishing solutions into manufacturing industry In SO5 the results of the first 4 objectives will be combined to 3 demonstrator human-robot collaboration cells, one for each of the investigated process technologies. The 3 demonstrator cells will be tested in operational environment at 3 end-users. SYMPLEXITY is the consistent continuation of 3 recent EU projects that achieved TRL 4-5: COMET – Plug-and-produce COmponents and METhods for adaptive control of industrial robots SAPHARI – Safe and Autonomous Physical Human-Aware Robot Interaction poliMATIC – Polishing processes and tools development SYMPLEXITY will bring together the results and key partners of these 3 projects to achieve TRL7 and thereby support the European Industry to win the competition in the global market with higher quality, efficient manufacturing and economic production, based on human robot collaboration for polishing complex shaped metallic surfaces. Relevant branches are tool making, medical engineering, aeronautics and automotive industry. Case studies show, that for many applications todays >90% of manual work can be converted in 80 % of robotic work under human control and 20 % of manual work.