ICT infrastructure supporting seamless integration of certification procedures in microfactories

Digitalization can be considered as the main driving force towards achieving many different strategies, such as quality control and zero-defect manufacturing, green manufacturing and certified production. To this end, digital infrastructure in terms of Cyber-Physical Systems must be able to support various functionalities. The current work aims at supporting digitally potential micro-factories, in the sense that the minimum upfront investment is promoted. Also, herein, as a result of the EU H2020 project AVANGARD, where Cloud Manufacturing is tightly aligned with the concept of micro-factories and full production decentralization, the Blockchain architecture provides a secure interconnection layer, between all involved technology stacks, supporting in a modular fashion trust among disparate parties, traceability across organizational boundaries and a blueprint for seamless logging and auditing of activities by actors, software tools, IoT devices, and shopfloors, across supply chains. In addition, the concepts of end-to-end integration, MES & ERP involvement, link to the use phase (i.e. maintenance) towards through-life engineering services and finally procedures towards dynamic lifecycle assessment as well as a link to digital twins, are all discussed. The link to potential clients is also guaranteed. The case study of integrating Additive Manufacturing in such a production is used, indicating the added value of having interoperability as a criterion, even in the case where human-in-the-loop optimization of a factory is involved.