The primary objective of the SAFIRE project is to develop cloud-based analytics and reconfiguration capabilities that provide:

• Both reactive and predictive reconfiguration for both production systems and smart products
• Flexible run-time reconfiguration decisions during production rather than pre-planned at production planning time
• Real-time reconfiguration decisions for optimisation of performance and real-time production and product functions

The SAFIRE project targets two related technology challenges for smart factories that present new opportunities for improving production, products and services: Interconnected Systems of Production Systems (SoPS) within smart manufacturing environments where individual production systems and the SoPS as a whole have hardware and software requirements to be addressed to achieve specific business objectives such as scheduling, power consumption, throughput, and maintenance.

Connected Product Networks (CPNs) where networked smart products collect data, can be adapted in the field, and can deliver extended services to customers through optimisation of smart product performance parameters and customisation of products to environments, usage patterns and other dynamic factors. The advanced analytics and reconfiguration capabilities to be developed in SAFIRE will be based on mastering the big data challenges associated with manufacturing (sensor and process data), enterprise data and smart product data to provide advanced analytics that allow manufacturers to address production system behaviour forecasting and to establish optimisation methods that are integrated in the design and product chain.

The project will deliver big data analytic capabilities that meet real-time requirements so that dynamic run-time reconfiguration decisions are made during production time rather than pre-planned at production planning time.