European manufacturing competes in a global knowledge-driven economy, thus increasingly seeking competitive advantage through quality, agility and personalization based on the latest advances in IT. Increasing utilization of IT in mission-critical elements of the production brings opportunities for consistency, transparency and flexibility, bringing the “Iot size of 1” closer to reality even for mass-production industries. Most relevant for achieving the expected increase of production performance of highly customized products, is to master the complexity of the supply chain and logistics in the global production networks.

DIGICOR will build on experiences from former research as performed in the EU project ‘ARUM’, and will address the development of a collaboration platform, tools and services for the setup and coordination of production networks, in particular the integration of non-traditional, small but innovative companies (SME’s) and logistics providers into the supply chain of large manufacturers (OEM). The open platform will provide services creating a marketplace for the collaboration partners, for planning and controlling the collaborative production, the logistics and risk management, and will be open to third parties to add services for advanced analytics, simulation or optimization etc. The platform will provide seamless connectivity to the automation solutions, smart objects and real-time data sources across the network, simplifying the management and control of the production and logistics in execution.