EuProGigant Resilience Approach: A Concept for Strengthening Resilience in the Manufacturing Industry on the Shop Floor

Abstract

Crises lead to adverse effects in the value creation ecosystem. In the long term, they lead to uncertainties that can destabilize the system. Resilience is getting more and more critical in connected, value-added ecosystems. Crises such as the Corona pandemic, the Suez Canal blockage, the chip crisis, and rising energy prices can cause sudden change in the market demand-supply equilibrium. Those can be expressed as calamities. This concept aims to create calamity-avoiding mechanisms in the manufacturing industry based on a common data infrastructure and smart use of data and services. Calamity-avoiding mechanisms are essential for unplannable and unknown disturbance factors connecting enterprise value creation networks in multiple layers. Resilience mechanisms must be distributed, decentralized, and interoperable to reduce the effect of self-reinforcement of calamities and enable self-orchestration functionalities. Gaia-X, the European initiative for creating a common and sovereign data infrastructure, offers data exchange based on the EU legal framework and is crucial for the (inter-)operability of the mechanisms. This paper presents the concept of such resilience mechanisms, the processing of data in the vertical plane (within a company), and the benefits at the horizontal level (across supply chains of companies). The concept is developed in the context of the EuProGigant project. It follows a bottom-up approach and starts with the Self-Descriptions (SD) of all assets on the shop floor. The resilience approach includes five key points: SDs, stress scenarios and stress mechanisms, system theory and control, anomaly detection services, and self-orchestration.