A Decentralised Ecosystem of Collaborative Agile Manufacturing Processes Orchestrators for the transition to Circular Economy

An important component of a resource-efficient manufacturing industry and a key strategy within the circular economy is to keep components and their embodied material (including ‘critical’ or ‘advanced’ materials) in use for longer, thus, significant energy use and emissions to air and water (e.g. CO2 and SO2) can be avoided . In this current economy, parts and products need to be stretched further and further to maximize use, and thus repair becomes essential to keep these assets productive. It is evident that if organizations manage correctly, the refurbishment, re-manufacturing, re-use, upgrading and returns operations can become a very profitable side of their business. Refurbishment and re-manufacturing of industrial equipment can prove to be instrumental in saving lives and promoting operational uptime and will allow managers and health and safety executive directors to invest in safety improvements and production process improvements at the same time. MECCANO envisions to break down traditional manufacturing truism, bring a high level of automation to next generation “smart factories” through the combination of smart facilities, machines and equipment with built-in sensors, self-diagnostics and connection to other smart systems and applications inside and outside the enterprise boundary; going beyond the plant floor, enabling interaction with a broader environment, integrating and orchestrating business partners and suppliers and mastering inventory management. The MECCANO solution will be based on a new architecture of interconnected, virtualised autonomic and cognitive agents, allowing the interplay between virtual and physical worlds to create a fully networked world of embedded intelligent internetworked objects (hardware accelerators, embedded sensors, etc.) found in a fog arrangement within a manufacturing plant. The project will also deal with the mountains of isolated data that are often stranded in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) establishments.