By 2050 Europe aims to be climate neutral and the focus of renewables is increasing. The Flex4Fact project aims to develop an end-to-end ecosystem that takes a modular approach to enable flexible manufacturing in industry and create the conditions for the necessary energy transition in which all stakeholders can participate and benefit.
Currently, complex process industries and the segment of mixed clusters and distributed renewable energy flows are not covered. Indeed, at least three key elements of the Flex4Fact approach differ from current offerings:
- Enabling industrial flexibility through digital process twinning and machine learning techniques to address complex operational scenarios and exploit the full potential of the selected industrial cases.
- The end-to-end approach of the Flex4Fact platform, covering the entire technology stack required to achieve the results.
- A modular and multi-level approach that leverages flexible, hybrid architectures, open protocols, and standard interfaces. This to enable greater flexibility in the system itself and associated service offerings, remove barriers to entry for vendors in the value chain, and ensure data communication with existing IT legacy systems.
As a digital enabler for flexible energy consumption, the Flex4Fact platform will meet the needs of companies of all sizes, including SMEs that are affected by rising energy prices and have less "financial muscle" to deploy a combination of IT, manufacturing, and energy solutions.
The Flex4Fact project consist of a balanced European consortium, from North to South in Europe. In which critical technologies will be developed and implemented by several partners in five different industrial contexts.