Consultings

Scope:

The recent COVID-19 crisis, global political events and resulting supply network difficulties had a major effect on the manufacturing industry. Many manufacturing companies require rapid multidisciplinary assessment to repurpose, adapt and ramp up their manufacturing lines and reorganize their supply network, in light of new challenges, requirements and opportunities. A global pandemic and other unexpected events not only influence demand and supply quantities or the availability of resources, but these also require the manufacturing of completely new products, for example vital medical equipment, such as facemasks or respiratory devices when targeting a pandemic situation. In order to enable quick and successful adaptation to these unexpected changes, the manufacturing processes and the supply network should be designed in a robust way that enable multi-purpose production capabilities. New and appropriate concepts are required for assessing and performing production planning and automation, workforce utilization or supply chain optimization, among others. Performing such assessment and reconfiguration quickly and efficiently not only provides competitive advantage to the manufacturing company itself, but it is also vital at European level when tackling sudden shortages of key supplies. While large organizations typically have the capability and resources to perform such multidisciplinary assessments on-demand, it is much more difficult for SMEs to address these challenges. As such expertise is not available in-house, smaller companies find it difficult to locate and finance the assessments required for the fast and efficient repurposing of their production lines and supply chain processes. Getting access to such services through the Digital Technopole, based on a cloud-based pay-as-you-go provisioning model offers significant advantages to manufacturing companies, especially SMEs and mid-caps.  

Approach:

An important and relevant aspect of tackling the above-described challenges is the capability of offering services remotely from a cloud computing platform. Such cloud-based service offering provides several advantages; for example the service can scale on demand as resource requirements are increasing, or providing such service on a pay-as-you-go basis can help SMEs avoiding large capital investments and transferring these into regular smaller expenses. 

The University of Westminster's Centre for Parallel Computing is offering comprehensive consultancy services to cloud-enable existing simulation or optimization solutions. The offered service includes the containerization (into Docker containers) of the targeted application and then the creation of a cloud-based app that is directly deployable and executable from the Digital Agora. The followed approach utilizes the MICADO (Microservice-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) framework to create a ready to deploy and scalable cloud application that can be executed on-demand.

Outcome:

The resulting cloud-based service is fully compatible with the Digital Technopole and the Digital Agora. Therefore, it can be deployed and consumed on a pay-as-you-go basis by the clients, leading to more optimized manufacturing and supply-chain processes and offering an affordable and transparent business model when consuming such services.