May 15, 2023
Dear reader,
this is our second article presenting another one of the AUTO-TWIN project partners. As usual, we introduce the project, as well as the consortium partner, to give you an overall idea of what we are proposing.
The AUTO-TWIN project
The transition towards a Circular Economy is estimated to represent a $4.5 trillion global growth opportunity by 2030. Digital Twins availability is largely recognized as an accelerator and an enabler of Circular Economy in business and in production, but significant challenges are still standing in relation to its development within the present technological framework, the needed skill sets, and the implementation costs.
AUTO-TWIN addresses the technological shortcoming and economic liability of the current system engineering model by:
1) introducing a breakthrough method for automated process-aware discovery towards autonomous Digital
Twins generation, to support trustworthy business processes in circular economies;
2) adopting an (International Data Space) IDSbased common data space, to promote and facilitate the secure and seamless exchange of manufacturing/product/business data within value-networks in a circular-economy ecosystem;
3) integrating novel hardware technologies into the digital thread, to create smart Green Gateways, empowering companies to perform data and digital twin enabled green decisions, and to unleash their full potential for actual zero-waste Circular Economy and reduced dependency from raw materials.
The Syxis partner
The AUTO-TWIN Consortium is composed by 13 partners and associated entities across 7 countries.
SYXIS is an European Innovation Hub, for testing sustainable pathways. SYXIS is a network of companies (SMEs) that share technological and manufacturing instruments and knowledge to develop further into European projects and commercial projects. SYXIS was born in 2022 from Holonix and Cyberbrain experiences with the aim to acquire EU projects that can be executed successfully achieving results to enable synergic SMEs growth. Main focus of SYXIS is to carry our European proposals and projects in an efficient and result oriented way. SYXIS has strong expertise in innovation: more than 30 European projects among his actual associates, more than 400 organizations in his network, more than 90 innovation cases. In European projects SYXIS could have several roles as: Project Coordinator, Technical coordinator, IoT and IT Platform developer, Pilot Harmonizers (Pilot WP leader), Solution Ambassadors, Exploitation Managers, Dissemination and Communication manager and Data Managers.
The Auto-Twin project objectives
AUTO-TWIN vision is addressing four specific objectives, each one solving a well-defined research challenge,
resulting in measurable exploitable results, used as clear and realistic indicators for the achievement of the project goals. These objectives, and their underlying research questions defined in section Methodology, will guide all the activities of the work plan of this Research and Innovation action. AUTO-TWIN concept is agnostic and domain independent.
OBJECTIVE 1 – Automated digital twin generation, operations, and maintenance in circular value chains.
AUTO-TWIN will develop a novel data-driven method based on a process mining approach for generation and adaptation of multi-fidelity resolution digital twins from data acquired, at multiple levels, along the value chain. Full automation, trustworthiness, and “skill-free” play are key-selling points of the project approach, based on sparse traces of manufactured objects flowing in the value chain. The project will rely on multiple automated actors to discover the flows in the value chain and to automatically generate and update digital twins of complex business processes, starting from the specific manufacturing processes till the whole supply chain.
OBJECTIVE 2 – Trustworthy high resolution track & trace of products and processes among different actors in circular value chains
The consistency of data and information sharing among stakeholders across the value network are fundamental for the validity of digital twins. AUTO-TWIN aims to: i) enable high resolution track&tracing through precise and detailed data and information about products and processes; ii) manage data and access rights in a seamless, secure, powerful and flexible way; iii) manage data sharing and sovereignty within circular data spaces. AUTO-TWIN will define, implement and test its systems and solutions in real business environments in very different sectors to define business guidelines and best practices and share them with the community.
OBJECTIVE 3 – Reduce skills and knowledge gaps for all involved actors through augmented intelligence.
In order to perform significant progress in the state-of-art, the design of a new approach for assessing skills and mapping production processes is a mandatory requirement. It should be reliable, complete and built on standardized frameworks. The AUTO-TWIN project answers to this requirement developing: (i) Explainability for Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques able to decrease the required skills; (ii) tools to assess the current skills of the single worker in a specific production context and (iii) to identify (through a data-driven approach) the most efficient upskilling paths for operators as well as their related production processes.
OBJECTIVE 4 – Augmented intelligence algorithms for decision making at Green Gateways.
AUTO-TWIN will define new methods and algorithms to extend knowledge and support actors in decision-making at Green Gateways. Artificial Intelligence techniques and process mining algorithms will be developed to extract significant correlations, then transformed into explainable knowledge, underlying the product data along their life cycles and their manufacturing and logistic processes as well as the dependency of the demand on pricing and product characteristics. This knowledge, together with digital twin predictions on relevant multidimensional indicators (i.e., circularity indices, productivity indices, supply chain indices) will be used with augmented knowledge and real time production data for optimal coordination of the value chain under stochastic behavior
The role of Syxis in the Auto-Twin project
Technology Provider
Syxis is a federation that involves innovative enterprises for testing sustainable pathways. Syxis will be involved in the development of the project’s software architecture. Also, Sixis will ensure the creation of a common data space that will guarantee AUTO-TWIN applicability. Moreover, SYX will cooperate with develop the profiler and assess the skill gap of a worker, and a UX that could guarantee the user-friendly utilization of data. Within the testing and integration phase, Syxis will be mainly involved in the deployment and operation of a code maintenance repository to ensure the usability of the software components.
With respect to the project’s dissemination phases, Syxis will take care of identifying the contributions that the project will make to Europe’s AI community, associations, and clusters. Finally, Syxis will guarantee that the project is fully compliant with all legal, ethics and societal applicable rules.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has received funding from the Horizon Europe programme under the Grant Agreement No. 101092021
This article has been extracted and freely adapted from the Auto-Twin official website and Proposal.