To promote the development of an active community around the EFPF Platform, the EFPF platform is being made available for experimentation through an un-funded experimentation call. The unfunded experimentation provides an opportunity for researchers, students, and other interested parties to test, validate, and develop EFPF platform including the tools, services, and infrastructure (e.g., the Data Spine elements).
Open experimentation is key to investigating and experimentally validating highly innovative and revolutionary ideas for next generation connected factories and smart factory paradigms at a lower cost, in a more rapid way. In this respect, the open experimentation program is seen as a catalyst for the creation of a vibrant ecosystem around the EFPF platform.
The (unfunded) open experimentation program in the EFPF project is organized into 2 hands-on events, each presenting a set of interesting challenges to the participants, such as these described below:
Challenge 1: Evaluate Shop floor to platform connectivity using EFPF IoT Gateway TSMatch.
The goal of the challenge is to assess the usability and functionality of such IoT gateways and implement potential extensions to ease the data provisioning process.
To assess the usability and functionality of such IoT gateways, participants are asked to use TSMatch to establish data exchange between a set of virtual IoT Things and EFPF platform more specifically EFPF data spine.
Participants are also asked to propose ideas that would improve the data provisioning process, in the form of detailed specifications, mock ups, or prototypes.
Challenge 2: Creating and evaluating EFPF Apps.
The goal is to evaluate the usability of the EFPF SDK by creation of sample EFPF applications (Apps).
To validate the functionality of the SDK and its related environment, participants are asked to
Follow the flow described on the EFPF User Guide 101 in order to create the development environment
Participants are then asked to propose ideas for projects that may be developed using the framework
The application to be developed should include the following steps:
Designing processes
Integrating with the EFPF data spine
Developing the application backend
Developing interfaces and GUIs
Eventually, developing dashboards and graphs with output live data
Finalizing with the development of prototypes
Deployment of the prototypes in the Marketplace.
The participants are also asked to fill a questionnaire regarding their experience using the development tools and proposing ideas to improve it.
The main goal of the hands-on events is to brainstorm solutions for the identified challenges and to test and validate various components of the EFPF platform. Awards/prizes will be given to the teams with the three best solutions. Moreover, direct networking opportunities with the EFPF partners can be classified as a bonus. In addition, participants will also benefit from:
Practical hands-on experience with federated digital platform, industrial IoT, and industry 4.0 topics
Interaction and networking opportunities with international companies
Chance to demonstrate technical skills
Support to publish results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal or well recognised conference
The first hands-on event is organised by fortiss and will involve different stakeholders, e.g., students, researchers, participants from research projects. Further Details about the Unfunded Experimentation is provided at the webpage:
https://www.efpf.org/efpf-community