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.

The overarching goal of PowerizeD is to develop breakthrough technologies of digitalized and intelligent power electronics, in order to enable sustainable and resilient energy generation, transmission and applications. PowerizeD enhances the level of mechanical and electrical integration of new driver circuits into power electronics and allows for the first time common optimization of all power switch functionalities. Regarding data sharing along the value chain, PowerizeD drives the novel approach of Federated Learning as a methodical approach to an intrinsically encrypted transfer of confidential and proprietary data. Also new is the usage of detailed electrical physical models in digital twins of real time digitally monitored and controlled power electronic devices. Unlike other projects focusing on competence and technology with limited effort on demonstration, this project will start from vital societal needs, by identifying and analyzing the key generic technology challenges from broad application scopes. Major effort will be spent on cross-domain research and innovation. The developed technologies will be demonstrated and evaluated via a large number of universally applicable results. To realize this ambition, a large project consortium will incorporate the needed competencies and resources along the whole value chain. 24 Large Entities, 19 Small Medium Enterprises and 22 research partners from 12 EU countries – representing the entire value chain from materials to “system of systems” – strive to demonstrate the applicability of these innovative approaches to multiple industrial domains. Among the concrete objectives are a 25% reduction or power losses, a device and system lifetime increase of 30%, a chip size reduction of at least 10% and a shortening of the design time by 50%. By this, PowerizeD addresses the three megatrends Independence, Sustainability and Digitalization, thereby opening pathways to massive economic and societal benefits for the EU.