Deadline: 12-Aug-22
KITT4SME is offering grants to the small teams for demonstrating an AI solution in a relevant manufacturing environment.
The goal of the KITT4SME Type B Open Call is to provide financial support to third parties to develop pilot experiments that validate the technical and business value of the KITT4SME platform for the manufacturing end users to adopt AI solutions in the prioritised key areas.
KITT4SME has prioritised the following three application areas as game changers for the target experiments:
- Artificial Intelligence for Quality Control that aims in early and automatic error-detection and better run time decisions
- Artificial Intelligence for Reconfiguration or product personalization – on both levels of production optimization and of optimization of scheduling, and
- Artificial Intelligence for Human-Machine Interaction.
Scope: Create industrial demonstrators and disseminate the acquired success stories from the use of the KITT4SME platform. Enhance KITT4SME’s portfolio of AI-solutions that add value to the production systems of manufacturing SMEs, with an emphasis on the reuse of existing solutions (create packages that use one or more solutions in the KITT4SME platform) and benefiting of the KITT4SME platform.
Objectives
The project supports SMEs and mid-caps in growing along one or more of the value creation axes pursuing the following high-level objectives:
- To make available ready-to-use easily configurable AI-digital packages for SMEs: The envisioned platform infrastructure and its deployment processes are devised for application in brownfield as SMEs cannot afford to discard already working systems or platforms they have adopted.
- To use artificial intelligence for shop floor orchestration: Human decision-makers, along with their unreplaceable expertise, are not cut off from the process but are rather empowered by a data-driven digital factory environment.
- To build a competence development centre that advances European workforce: KITT4SME responds to this dramatic need for more human-aware production systems by putting the worker at the centre of data-driven personalised training paths meant to realign skills offer and demand while promoting career development and job satisfaction.
- To extend the offer of local ecosystem: KITT4SME recognises that the value of a digital platform does not reside in the offered services per se but it is promoted and multiplied by the size of the ecosystem of players that adopts it.
- To support standardisation in the fields of sovereign data economy and characterisation of workers skills and training experiences: To this end the project pursues a twofold strategy: on the one hand, it considers and employs already existing European reference architectures and standards both concerning Business-to-Business (B2B) digital industrial platforms and characterisation of workers competences; on the other hand, it participates to pre-normative standardisation initiatives with the aim to provide further feedback concerning infrastructural and data semantic aspects as well as for expanding current standards (e.g. ESCO, O*NET) in the field of skills and training characterisation.
Funding Information
- Total funding available: 1 500 000,00
- Funding: Up-to EUR 200,000/team
- Expected duration of participation: 12 months
Benefits
The main benefits of Type-B Open Call for the applicants are expected to be:
- to receive financing to develop and integrate the proposed solution in the platform and for validating novel AI components in the shop floor, gathering experience, and evidence for improving the shop floor performance;
- to get technical support for interfacing AI solutions with FIWARE based platforms and introduce their solution to the KITT4SME architecture and ecosystem;
- to gain visibility through the project’s testing and dissemination activities, through RAMP (if they choose to keep their solution in RAMP) and in the wider I4MS ecosystem;
- to create new success-stories from the application of new solutions to real-life Use Cases;
- to solve real-life problems of manufacturing SMEs and open new business opportunities.
Eligible Countries
Only Applicants legally established/resident in any of the following countries are eligible:
- The Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU), including their outermost regions;
- The Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) linked to the Member States;
- H2020 associated countries (those which signed an agreement with the Union as identified in Article 7 of the Horizon 2020 Regulation): according to the updated list published by the EC;
- UK applicants are eligible under the conditions set by the EC for H2020 participation.
Eligibility Criteria
- All applicants will have to abide to all general requirements described in this section to be considered eligible for the open calls funding scheme of KITT4SME.
- All third parties (individual legal entities – not teams) have a maximum limit of EUR 100’000,00 to be received as Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) in Smart Anything Everywhere (SAE) and ICT innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) initiatives.
For more information, visit https://kitt4sme.eu/open-call/