The DIGITbrain Project is composed by a consortium of 36 partners coordinated by PNO Consultants. During its lifetime it will recruit a further 35-40 collaborators in two Open Calls, mainly technology and manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The Digital Brain is a novel concept, extending the Digital Twin towards supporting the full lifecycle of industrial products and facilitating the configuration and orchestration of assets related to an industrial-product instance.
The manufacturing industry is in constant evolution; customers have new requirements and want more personalisation; interoperability with new products and technologies is expected; legislations, regulations, and norms are becoming stricter; the environment calls for more protection and less pollution; the aging of the workforce jeopardises the collective know-how. All these aspects cause an increasing pressure that the manufacturing industry needs to master in the most efficient and innovative way possible. Especially manufacturing SMEs are challenged by these aspects, because of the limited resources and the difficulty in accessing digital technologies and advanced manufacturing hardware tailored to their needs.
The aim of the project is to develop the Digital Brain that will support manufacturing companies in improving their innovation, efficiency, and competitiveness. Enabling them to use data and associated AI-based optimisation algorithms will help them to create a new level of personalised and optimised manufacturing.
The Digital Brain - as displayed in Figure 1 - will store data about production lines/machinery used in factories throughout their entire life cycle. This will enable a new manufacturing model, called ‘Manufacturing as a Service’ (MaaS), which will allow for a much more specialized creation of products in potentially smaller quantities, but still in an economically feasible way.
The Department of Engineering at Aarhus University both contribute to the DIGITbrain project as a Digital Innovation Hub via the AU DIGIT Centre as well as with the research results we have reached in the AU Centre for Digital Twins. The first role will be assisting SMEs with establishing digital twins with the MaaS services led by Xuping Zhang. The second role will be extending the existing co-simulation technologies originating from the INTO-CPS project further to form a part of the overall DIGITbrain solution led by Peter Gorm Larsen.
