In order to serve its customers, the manufacturing industry must adhere to production standards and fixed delivery and production times. Factories are designed with redundancies and parallel production lines to cope with production peaks and breakdowns of individual plants. As a result, individual factories have a surplus of production capacity: in some cases up to 50 or 60 % of unutilised capacity per year. At the same time, increasing digitalisation and cross-company value creation networks are placing greater demands on the manufacturing industry. Improved internal and external communication can lead to more flexible, customised and efficient production of smaller batch sizes - and ultimately to a more competitive and sustainable economy. In order to react quickly to fluctuations in production capacity - bottlenecks or under-utilisation - and to increase the overall efficiency of existing plants, processes and procedures are required for simple, flexible and fast order placement and processing as well as outsourcing. FlexProd is a new type of platform architecture that has been developed as an interface between clients and plant operators in a decentralised network. FlexProd's approach is designed to ensure rapid processing of (supra-regional) projects and enable more efficient utilisation of resources. Its design is based on solid technical methods that strictly follow security-by-design approaches and set new standards in terms of mediation, speed, data protection, transparency and openness. Essentially, three core technologies were researched and integrated to achieve this goal, and the resulting architecture was realised as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the capabilities and evaluate the solution. Firstly, a decentralised MachMaking component identifies the appropriate production facility and service offering for contracts to be awarded. The industrial sector currently lacks comprehensive profiles for mapping heterogeneous plants in terms of suitable technological and economic conditions. Formalisms for the inter-organisational representation of matchmaking assets at different levels of abstraction and several frameworks have therefore been developed. Furthermore, there is a lack of decentralised recommendation mechanisms that enable inter-organisational coordination of outsourcing supply and demand. This task required a hybrid matchmaking solution with semantic similarity measures and dynamic trust mechanisms for binding matching of industrial assets. Secondly, by providing a secure, anonymous auction service, FlexProd helps customers and suppliers to actually complete a transaction without inadvertently revealing data or exposing trade secrets. This is achieved through the use of Multiparty Computing (MPC), which enables calculations on encrypted data. However, as MPC technology does not scale well and is quite slow, carefully developed components and protocols were required to support an appropriate number of participants. In addition, MPC was extended with verifiable computing methods to also improve the traceability of individual transactions, again without disclosing sensitive data. Thirdly, the integration of the blockchain improved the traceability and transparency of the platform, thereby also increasing trust in the marketplace and subsequently acceptance. The approach in FlexProd was to integrate suitable consensus mechanisms that provide the required performance and throughput, yet are scalable for larger marketplaces. However, in order to be future-proof and support the European Green Deal, the solution developed was also optimised for energy efficiency. FlexProd was a joint project of Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Johannes Kepler University Linz, X-Net Services GmbH and EBNER Industrieofenbau GmbH.
- Abstract: To serve its clients, the manufacturing industry must commit to comply with production standards and defined delivery and production times. The resulting redundancies and parallelly equipped production lines ensure that failures of individual plants can be managed, and production peaks can be covered with the highest quality at all times. As a result, the manufacturing industry has a surplus of existing production capacity, which in some cases means up to 50% or even 60% of idle capacity per year for individual plants. Due to increasing digitalisation as well as cross-company value creation networks, demands on the manufacturing industry are continually increasing. More flexible, individual, and efficient production, as well as smaller batch sizes, are the goals, and efficient production technologies are just one step on the way towards achieving those goals. Processes and procedures for the simple, flexible and rapid placement and processing of orders and outsourcing are required in order to respond quickly to fluctuations in production capacity - bottlenecks or under-utilisation - and to increase the overall efficiency of existing facilities.
The project FlexProd will develop an interface connecting clients and plant operators. Conceived as a platform, FlexProd will ensure fast processing of (supra-regional) projects as well as more efficient utilisation of resources.
The project therefore researches a platform architecture that (1) de-centrally identifies the suitable production plant and the matching service offer for orders to be awarded (MatchMaking), (2) supports customers and suppliers through the actual establishment of a transaction, without disclosing data inadvertently or divulging trade secrets (by providing a secure anonymous auction service); and (3) ensures the traceability and transparency required for the acceptance of the use of the auction service through the integration of Blockchain technologies. The project's primary innovations result from the high degree of decentralisation and the development of security algorithms and standards to best protect sensitive business data (e.g., corporate data, production data or project calculations).
The involvement of all relevant stakeholders ensures goal-oriented development. Ebner Industrieofenbau GmbH, as a plant construction company, knows the current situation, in which orders in the millions are calculated and planned by means of Excel documents, as well as requirements of the market. AIT, JKU and X-Net are developing new approaches within the project to support agile production and significantly reduce transaction times and costs, enabling a new level of resource efficiency and productivity.

- Partners: AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (coordinator), X-Net Services GmbH, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Ebner Industrieofenbau GmbH
- Funding programme: Production of the future, 28th call, 1.2 Agile, integrated product and process development
- Project duration: 04/2019-09/2021