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Work Package 0

This Work Package is meant to cover the overall legal, contractual, financial and administrative management of the project and to establish a reliable contact with the EC throughout the project duration. The overall co-ordination and control of the international collaborative work will be done by IMI (formerly RPK) as the coordinating partner, together with the management board, which will be defined. Moreover, this Work package will ensure that the work is carried out in a time and cost effective manner and will supervise the preparation and the overall quality of deliverables.

Work Package 1

The objective of the X-Change project is to derive a new methodology for designing and controlling collaborative production systems under lifecycle considerations. The main hypothesis perceived by X-Change is that the production engineers in charge of these activities, can be considerably assisted in their decisions, if they had available information regarding the flexibility of their production system and network. Considering this, Work Package 1 acquires the current stat-of-the-art in context to X-Change and developes several the flexibility evaluation methods which later on will be used in the Work Package 2 and 3.
The output will particulary provide the requirements for the development of the "flexibility platform" in Work Package 2.

Work Package 2

The aim of this Work Package is the implementation of the flexibility evaluation toolbox (a collection of several flexibility evaluation methods) that has been defined in Work Package 1. The flexibility platform will be a "stand-alone" module that can be easily 'plugged-in' to any supervising and management software system. In the context of Work Package 3, it will be integrated within the overall X-Change lifecycle platform. It will offer to its user the possibility of 'live', 'near-realtime' flexibility monitoring by acquiring data from different sources and presenting the degree of flexibility for different production areas.

Work Package 3

The main output of this Work Package is X-Change lifecycle platform that is able to manage changes of a collaborative production system in its lifecycle. The functionalities developed here will be based on the definition of case studies, which take place in the initial phase of Work Package 4 and in the state-of-the-art in Work Package 1. The solution conceived in this Work Package will be able to interoperate with standard factory supervising systems. It will also be applicable for different changing situations such as introduction of new product, new competitor, change of order etc. in order to guarantee applicability across different sectors of industry, across different types of companies and different occasions. It will be tailored for use by different people that influence production system design and operating decisions, e.g. plant managers, suppliers, engineers, services.

Work Package 4

Within Work Package 4 the industrial case studies are defined. This will provide necessary input for building the flexibility evaluation toolbox and to provide the test bed for validating the developed X-Change lifecycle platform during the last phase of the project. Additionally, the current practices in change management pursued by the industrial partners are recorded. Furthermore the evaluation of the X-Change lifecycle platform based on different evaluation criteria such as efficiency, user friendliness, reliability and openness is examined.

Work Package 5

In order for the X-Change lifecycle platform to be adopted by industrial practice, this approach needs to be disseminated among potential users. Extensive external dissemination and marketing activities need to take place. The development of a web portal as an important dissemantion channel will take place. Furthermore the exploitation of the project results on the market and within partner enterprises will be accomplished. The dissemination of the results to industry sectors, to academia, and to interest groups. through conferences, work shops, public days etc. will comlete this Work Package.