In recent years, industrial processes have reached a high level of automation and a remarkable evolution in digitization within the framework of Industry 4.0, most recently in the development of Digital Twins (DTs) as a decision support tool. However, the high variability in the industry (which significantly affects production) requires solutions and development of tools for decision support in the operation that contemplate and mitigate its effects.

Such variability/uncertainty is caused both by events external to the plants (changes in the composition of raw materials, use of different energy sources, price fluctuations, demand and specifications of final products, etc.) and that generated by phenomena occurring in the process itself (chemical reactions under changing conditions, manufacturing differences between intermediate products, etc.). The effect of variability on the optimal operation of industrial processes can be mitigated, for example, using DTs or advanced control systems that incorporate optimization techniques that account for such uncertainty.

This project aims to contribute to plant autonomy in the face of changing operating scenarios, mitigating the effect of variability in production. In that direction, within the context of Industry 4.0, specifically in the areas of digitization, modeling, control and optimization, the objectives of the project are:

1. To develop and improve strategies for analyzing and modeling sources of variability/uncertainty affecting the processes.
2. To study and develop appropriate methods for decision making support in plants with high variability/uncertainty.
3. To develop tools that implement these methods aiming at extending the functionalities of the DTs developed in the framework of the a-CIdiT project.

The coordinated project will provide solutions to these problems, present in the considered industrial case studies and pilot plants. In particular:

1. MDF fiberboard manufacturing plant and a water purification process using microalgae in a laboratory plant (Subproject 1).
2. Pilot plant for food sterilization and pilot plant for the valorization of fishing by-products (Subproject 2).
3. Wind generator park and a Power-To-X energy generation plant (Subproject 3).