Through the introduction of new technologies and connectivity, Industry 4.0 projects allow manufacturers to increase the efficiency and quality of their processes. Now, a new CEN and CENELEC Workshop Agreement will provide the basis for the establishment of a European federated smart factory ecosystem that will facilitate the exchange of innovation and information across a wide array of stakeholders around Europe.
This objective is at the heart of Horizon2020 Project EFPF "European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing". The Project aims to develop a federated smart factory ecosystem, accompanied by a digital platform that interlinks different stakeholders of the digital manufacturing domain. The key success factor to achieve such a project is seamless connectivity and interoperability: connectivity and interoperability show their full potential when they can be implemented as simply as possible.
To support these basic requirements and to increase its market uptake, some considerations were made already at the outset of the project, on how to make the project results as transparent and accessible to the market as possible. A CWA (CEN and CENELEC Workshop Agreement) was chosen as the best solution to this end.
Based on this, a dedicated Workshop (CEN/CLC/WS EFPFInterOp) was created under the leadership of ASI, Austrian Standards International. After more than two years of work, on 23 November 2022, it published the new CWA 17907 'Reference architecture for federating manufacturing platforms focusing on the interoperability on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Protocol, Security and Data Model level’. Its goal? Provide a blueprint for a federated platform and describe components and functionalities that reduce the barrier to innovation by providing seamless access to services and solutions through an open platform.
In addition to the definition of a reference architecture, CWA 17907 also describes a specific implementation of a federated platform from the EFPF. The components of this platform are illustrated in the following figure:
Next to EFPF project partners, other interested stakeholders participated to the development of the CWA, including representatives from EFPF’s sister projects like the Zero Defects Manufacturing Platform (ZDMP).
Through the creation of a federated ecosystem of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) platforms, companies active in the manufacturing domain will be able to develop and manage agile, ad-hoc collaborative networks, establish dynamic supply chains, and optimise production processes, thus meeting market demands such as lot-size-one manufacturing.
To ensure an easy access to the CWA, it is made publicly available for free download at this link.
Frédéric MLANAO
fmlanao@cencenelec.eu
