First Open Call for ‘CloudiFacturing’ announced

The first open call for involvement with the 'CloudiFacturing' project in the European Commission’s I4MS Funding Programme has been announced. This great funding opportunity, especially focused on SME participation, is for: Testing and implementation of the latest high-performance computing and modelling technologies.

The European Union's initiative ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) connects SMEs, startups and mid-cap companies with European Digital Innovation Hubs, who can help companies to test and adopt the latest digital technologies.

CloudiFacturing - Cloudification of Production Engineering for Predictive Digital Manufacturing - is a European Innovation Action (IA) in the framework of Factories of the Future (FoF) PPP with the mission of optimising 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 of 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. With the Open Call, I4MS is seeking innovative use cases in the context of the project’s mission.

Use case impact

The use cases should 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.  

The call comprises:

1. simulations of manufacturing processes or manufacturing tools,
2. leveraging factory data to learn from it, and
3. optimising manufacturing processes and/or the manufacturability of goods

The use cases need to be driven by the ultimate end user, preferably SMEs. Seven or more Application Experiments are planned to be funded in this call which has an overall European Commission contribution of roughly EUR 700 000.

The call opening date is 1 July 2018 and the closing date will be 30 September 2018. The duration of the successful funded experiments will be 12 months from 1 January to 31 December 2019.

More information including how to access the call through regional Digital Innovation Hubs can be found in this download document and/ or via this web link.