Manufacturing companies are continuously facing the challenge of redesigning and adjusting their manufacture systems. They adapt their process to produce goods adapted to specific requirements and produced under the minimum required production rate, guaranteeing high quality and limiting the use of resources in order to reduce production costs. Therefore, reducing waste, scraps and defects, as well as production costs and lead times will allow to increase productivity and hence, to pursue manufacturing excellence.
Nevertheless, current solutions show three major drawbacks: huge amount of data to manage during the manufacturing process; complexity of current solutions, not accessible for SMEs; Dynamic behaviour of the manufacturing factories; complexity of diverse, connected, interdependent entities which need suitable modelling and simulation approaches and data fusion techniques.