IMS sponsors the European Project Coach, Dr. Christoph Runde, at the MBE Summit held at NIST on 2-5 April, 2017. The full program is below.
“Activities on Product Service Platforms Interoperability in Europe”
Christoph Runde, IMS – European Union
This contribution will present the outcomes of the workshop on product/service platforms interoperability held in
Brussels on November 21st, 2016. Within the European Union’s initiative in the area of the Factories of the Future,
a number of running European projects deals with the development of integrated product service systems. All
these projects such as Diversity, Falcon, ICP4Life, Manutelligence, ProRegio and Psymbiosys follow interoperability
approaches. We detected efforts to develop specific own integration platforms as well as contributing largely to
existing standards like Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration or like RAMI4.0. Long existing initiatives like the
ProSTEP iViP association – a standardization initiative in virtual product development – demonstrated its strategy
on pushing its guideline Code of PLM Openness into industrial application to improve future PLM (product lifecycle
management) interoperability. Also the European Factory of the Future Research Association (EFFRA), which
develops visions of the factories of the future, works on interoperable digital manufacturing platforms to connect
manufacturing services. The European Commission fosters the coordination of European, national and regional
initiatives such as Industrie 4.0 (Germany), Industrie du Futur (France), Smart Industry (Netherlands) in order to
build a European platform of initiatives in the relevant field. Having in mind the platform and data economy
framing and necessary criterions like security / trust, this European network shall moderate common answers to
the key challenges, that we face in manufacturing today, e.g. flexibility, agility, logistics 4.0, mass customization (lot
size 1), autonomous systems, cobotics, AI, zero-defects, energy and resource efficiency, fully linked physical and
digital worlds (digital twins both for product and production).