1st Open Call for CloudiFacturing

Deadline: Sep 30, 2018  
CALL EXPIRED

CloudiFacturing - Cloudification of Production Engineering for Predictive Digital Manufacturing - is a European Innovation Action (IA) in the framework of Factories of the Future (FoF) with the mission of optimizing production processes and producibility, using Cloud/HPC-based modelling and simulation, and leveraging online factory data with advanced data analytics; thus, contributing to the competitiveness and resource efficiency manufacturing companies, especially SMEs. To pursue this mission, computationally demanding production engineering and simulation as well as data analytics tools are to be provided as Cloud services to ease accessibility and make their use more affordable.

CloudiFacturing is a project, which is open to new (teams of) participants (3rd parties). With this announcement, we would like to draw your attention to our upcoming Call / Request for Proposals to initiate the creative process of generating ideas for Application Experiments. Application Experiments are dedicated sub-projects with one-year duration that are executed within the scope of CloudiFacturing.

Our Open Call will allow you to propose such an Application Experiment!

With our Open Call, we are looking for / seeking innovative use cases in the context of the project’s mission. The use cases shall clearly state their industrial impact for the involved manufacturing companies, based on their expected benefit from exploiting computational engineering and production services and workflows powered by the CloudiFacturing technology.

We especially welcome use cases that

1. a)  simulate manufacturing processes or manufacturing tools,

2. b)  leverage factory data to learn from it, and

3. c)  optimize manufacturing processes and/or manufacturability of goods.

The use cases need to be driven by the end user; in other words, a manufacturing company, preferably an SME.

Small consortia consisting of 2 to 5 multidisciplinary partners (e.g. end users from the manufacturing sector, independent software vendors - ISVs, engineering consultants, research organizations, HPC providers, Digital Innovation Hubs) have the opportunity to propose use cases from different manufacturing sectors to be executed within the framework of CloudiFacturing. The minimum number of third parties (partners in the experiment consortium) in an Application Experiment is one end user and one ISV. The experiment consortium has to be cross-border meaning that third parties must be located in different European countries or associated countries. End users should (preferably) be new to the technology being investigated in the experiment; being new to EC projects is also highly welcome. We encourage proposals with a high ratio of SMEs (or mid-caps) and participants from new member states.

Why to participate?

Selected proposers (third parties) will have the opportunity

• to investigate and gather experience with HPC/Cloud Computing technologies for their use case;

• to explore technical benefits, e.g. better assessment of the producibility and production process optimization by more accurate simulation results using HPC/Cloud resources;

• to exploit information discovered in factory data to improve processes;

• to assess Cloud---based business settings and their impact; and

• to leverage the CloudiFacturing Digital Marketplace being developed as a new distribution channel.

What does CloudiFacturing offer?

• Vendorindependent Cloud infrastructure already containing engineering and simulation applications and services on which new experiments can be built to extend the range of service offerings via the CloudiFacturing Digital Marketplace.

• A tailored HPC/Cloud infrastructure (with a contractual environment protecting IPR).

• Independent evaluation of experiments against your requirements.

• Experiences from more than 30 experiments

• Consultancy on business models.

• Participation in the I4MS ecosystem (www.i4ms.eu).

If you are interested in our Open Call or you have questions, please contact one of our local DIHs spread all over Europe:

• For southwest Europe:

• o Elena Femenía: efemenia@insomniaconsulting.es o Insomnia, Spain

• For south of Europe:

• o Marco Barbagelata: m.barbagelata@stamtech.com o Stam, Italy

• For southeast and northeast Europe:

• o Gabor Vicze: gabor.vicze@innomine.com
• o Innomine, Hungary or
• o Tomáš Karásek: tomas.karasek@vsb.cz
• o Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

• For northwest and north Europe:

• o Simon Bergweiler: Simon.Bergweiler@dfki.de o SmartFactory KL / DFKI, Germany

These DIHs will support you with your questions and ideas and they will help you to prepare a high- quality proposal for experiments that well suit our call and have a high potential impact.

If you are interested or you have questions, you can also contact us at: contact@cloudifacturing.eu.

The CloudiFacturing consortium will publish more information (e.g. Guide for Applicants, FAQ, webinar, etc.) on its web page about its 1st Open Call between now and the 1st of July 2018: http://www.cloudifacturing.eu.

Summary of the Open Call facts:

Seven or more Application Experiments are planned to be funded in this call with an overall EC contribution of roughly 700 k€.

Opening date
1.7.2018

Closing date
30.9.2018

Duration of experiment
12 months (1. Jan. to 31. Dec. 2019)

Funding (EC contribution)1
approx. 100 K€ per experiment depending on number of partners (max. 60 k€ per 3rd party)

The time between the closing of the call and the start of the experiments is used for experiment selection by independent experts and contract set-up between the 3rd parties and the coordinating organization of CloudiFacturing, namely Fraunhofer.