SAFIRE Project Overview

A Research and Innovation Project Supporting Factories of the Future

The SAFIRE project is developing innovative technologies and infrastructure that enable Reconfiguration-as-a-Service for dynamic smart factory systems and manufactured smart products. The innovations being developed exploit cloud-based services and computing power to continually optimise the performance of production systems and products focusing on throughput, power consumption, usage, maintenance, utilisation levels, and other key factors.

The SAFIRE solution is targeted as an add-on for existing production systems, or next generation smart factory operating systems, allowing production systems to be transformed to include capabilities for dynamic real-time reconfiguration and optimisation.

Situation Model and Determination Services

Analyses correlations between production and products including situational information to dynamically monitor and identify situations based on process information from various sensors, products and databases. Analysis results make it possible to adapt configurations to specific factory and product situations.

Predictive Analytics Engine

Provides support for real-time big data analytics based on the Lambda+ architecture offering data aggregation, filtering, mapping, storage and processing in a real-time context. The engine is capable of using machine learning algorithms to extract valuable knowledge and provide tolerance to failures enabling continuous operation despite hardware or software failures.

Optimisation and Reconfiguration Engine

Delivers reactive and predictive optimisations of production assets and product configurations within real-time constraints. The engine calculates new configurations that meet required system metrics (time constraints, communications bandwidths and latencies, power dissipation, maintenance cycles) and optimised reconfigurations are sent to connected production assets and products.

Security Services

Configured and deployed through a Security, Privacy, and Trust Framework that enables the identification of security requirements, prioritisation of security objectives and selection of technologies for implementation. Security services build an overall solution providing security, privacy and trust for production and product data and authentication and verification services to ensure the integrity of optimised configurations.

Results of the Predictive Analytics Engine are used by the Reconfiguration and Optimisation Engine, which generates optimised configurations for production systems and smart products. The Configuration Quality Evaluation evaluates the quality of old and more optimised configurations, based on the feedback loop. The Reconfiguration and Optimisation Engine uses the Reconfiguration Interfaces to load optimised configurations to connected production systems and smart products.