The PERFoRM project is presented by coordinator Michael Gepp, SIEMENS. Project has started on 01.10.2015 and ends after a term of 36 months on 30.09.2018. The aim of the project is to bring together the previous projects IDEAS, SOCRADES (feasibility of distributed modular approaches), GRACE, IMS-AESOP (creation of services / higher-level agents), PRIME (industrial approach of agent-based modular systems) and to collaborate this projects results.

Project	Link
IDEAS:	http://www.ideas-project.eu/
SOCRADES:	http://www.socrades.net/
GRACE:	http://grace-project.org/
IMS-AESOP:	http://www.imc-aesop.org/
PRIME:	Website has expired!

To ensure the success of the project and the milestones of a new generation of agile manufacturing systems that respond dynamically, reconfigurable and viable to the ever-changing market, the project has a clear structure that includes 12 work packages. Each work package is divided into several tasks that result in one or more work package-specific results. The PERFoRM project contains six milestones marking the completion of key project-relevant phases (see Gant chart).

All work packages contribute to other work packages and identify the project unit leading to implementation in four use-case cases (see WP overview), represented by 18 partners from 6 different countries with excellent expertise in the various aerospace technology sectors, compressors, Household appliances and micro-electric vehicles The project PERFoRM is Michael Gepp, Partner SIEMENS, coordinates. The project started on 01.10.2015 and ends after a term of 36 months on 30.09.2018.

To ensure the success of the project and the milestones of a new generation of agile manufacturing systems that respond dynamically, reconfigurable and viable to the ever-changing market, the project has a clear structure that includes twelve work packages. Each work package is divided into several tasks that result in one or more work package-specific results. The PERFoRM project contains six milestones marking the completion of key project-relevant phases (see Gant chart).

All work packages contribute to other work packages and identify the project unit leading to implementation in four use-case cases (see WP overview), represented by 18 partners from 6 different countries with excellent expertise in the various aerospace technology sectors, compressors, Household appliances and micro-electric vehicles

The Work Package dependencies and the inherent agile / iterative development of the project can be seen in the Figure.

Today’s European manufacturing industry is challenged by faster and faster changing conditions, constrains and objectives, informed decisions need to be taken in an increasingly short time. Production strategies, processes and product characteristics must evolve to keep the pace of a market where customer expectations and competitive pressure do not allow any uncertainness. These environment applications, as we are used to know, often represent a serious issue, as they are rigid, monolithic blocks not easily adaptable to new situation. At the same time production resources (equipment, processes, assets, products and materials, operators) are not visible or are hard wired connected in a static, hierarchical style, where each component is totally unaware of the surrounding context and production objectives. The challenge that the PERFoRM project aims to solve is the industrialisation of previous work on agile, smart and evolving systems. It is expected that this will put European industry in a stronger competitive position by being able to adapt production rapid configuration to the business needs and leverage production capacity to the fullest potential for business.

ICT has been the great enabler in the transformation of production systems from the classical centralized, monolithic and static organisation into an agile, highly reconfigurable, adaptable and dynamically interconnected to its external and internal environment – SMART FACTORY. Although Distributed Systems are already a reality in most shop floors, further actions are needed to fully exploit the benefits of fast reconfigurability, adaptability and rapid changeover. Hence there is a need to move in the direction of Cyber Physical Production Systems. The most noticeable features promoted by the CPPS paradigm are: development of plug-and-produce devices (self-contained equipment with dedicated individual control), acquisition of actual physical data by sensors that can be attached to the devices, usage of worldwide available data and services, communication technology, actuating the physical world by actors, and usage of multimodal interfaces.

The most important aspect in developing CPPS is the systems-of-systems aspect. In fact CPPS is composition of plug-and-produce devices, robots and machines (P an PR: plug-and-produce resource) that are plugged or unplugged according to the production system needs. The way these plug-and-produce devices are connected and interact with each other is one important research issue as it is how they are created, deployed and supported. Plug-and-produce devices have an identity, are able to communicate with each other and with the environment, configure and adjust themselves, store and deliver information in such a way that all together using their communication infrastructure define and create decentralized agile production systems. This communication infrastructure can also be used to plug a new set of services using the functions made available by the plug-and-produce devices and/or other services. Service composition is one fundamental aspect here as it will permit that new services are automatically or manually generated from the available ones.

With a large number of such interconnectable, standardised plug-and-produce devices it will be possible to create more agile factories provided a manufacturing service-bus created to allow their vertical integration into higher level business and production planning functions. This new company wide communication middleware must make plug-and-produce devices, robots and machines available to integrate them into the company wide operational control and business logic.

The concept of rapidly integrateable and self-adjusting plug-and-produce devices which can be combined with dynamic simulation, scheduling and optimisation methods to form agile production systems represents a radical new approach when compared to the traditional approach that can be found currently on shop floors. Previous projects such as IDEAS and SOCRADES proved the feasibility of distributed modular approaches at device level, while GRACE and IMS-AESOP proved that higher level services could be created based on a service or agent based approach, and PRIME is creating an industrial approach to create agent-based modular systems targeting in particular systems integrators. Therefore, it can be said that previous projects proved different individual solutions necessary to create an industry ready agile production system. However, none of them have proved the concept in an integrated form, which is necessary to achieve wider industrial uptake of these solutions. This is what PERFoRM aims to achieve. In addition to proving that these concepts can be seen in a holistic way, PERFoRM is aiming to harmonize these concepts and prepare standards to facilitate industrialisation and wider dissemination of plug-and-produce devices. Adaptors will be created for a range of devices, robots and machines to make them plug-and-produce ready by manufacturing service bus. In addition to providing a common interface for the plug-ability of production resources, the device adaptor will also allow more complex optimisation behaviour on local and global level. For example, an adaptor could facilitate the adjustment of robot trajectories when a new product is introduced or the repositioning of the robot (and its tool) for a better and more efficient execution of the task. This will be directly managed by the robot adaptor (based on the information received from the high level middleware) without the need for interventions by expert operators for re-programming the robot controller. With these adaptors, PERFoRM will ensure current devices and existing legacy equipment can be readily transformed into plug-and-produce resources.

With PERFoRM, true plug-and-produce devices are created by integrating existing TRL3-4 results and by following general concept of Cyber Physical Production Systems. Intelligent entities will be enabled to be plugged and unplugged into an industrial middleware. Common data and information interfaces and communication protocols for rapid integration and tuning will be prepared for standardisation. Adaptors for the integration of legacy resources will be created. In addition to this, vertical integration of plug-and-produce resources will be enabled to allow the creation of another level of services or applications that are attached to the enterprise network. These services and/or applications can compose data or information from the plug-and-produce devices (via the manufacturing service bus) and/or from other services. This way monitoring, simulation and optimisation methods can be deployed via the middleware and dynamically linked to the available plug-and-produce resources in the system. The middleware will be responsible to managing the connectivity when new resources become available or when they are removed. Also, the requirements of new products and their work flow through the system will be tracked by the middleware layer to allow higher level applications to focus on managing the production and business objectives rather than the updating of resource information. PERFoRM will specifically focus on integrating a multi-objective dynamic scheduling approach to manage work orders with flexible production systems. Ensuring consistent quality and reducing of energy consumption will be the main targets during the project.

The feedback form operators will be used to improve the changeover efficiency between different product variants. This is expected to allow more frequent changeovers by ensuring quality targets can more easily be maintained (by memorising past settings) or very quickly regained (by learning the most effective ramp-up and tuning strategies). The combination of local self-adjustment mechanisms embedded into the device adaptors and the global dynamic optimisation methods will allow existing and future manufacturing systems to become truly agile. The Figure illustrates the core innovations of PERFoRM.

The world economy is facing enormous pressure to manufacturing domain. At the client side, the demand for more customized, cheaper with higher quality products is driving the manufacturing companies to search for innovative development to achieve those requirements. On the company side, disturbances such as delays or shortages of supplement or resources breakdowns may have a deep impact in the company performance. Allied to those disturbances, there is the constant need for production cost reduction and here, energy consumption has an important influence on the overall budget. To this, it urges to develop and bring new paradigms into the manufacturing sphere, and particularly new manufacturing control systems, exhibiting features, such as modularity, re-configurability and fault tolerant.

In this project, we really want to achieve a next generation of agile manufacturing systems that are dynamically reconfigurable and evolvable to enable evolution, self-organisation and adaptation along the system life cycle, facing the challenges of continuously and rapidly changing market conditions and increasingly smaller lot sizes and shorter leadtime and time-to-market requirements. These systems should be based on modular plug-and-produce components (with build-in intelligence) with all the different actors involved in the manufacturing system life cycle (module suppliers, system integrators, end-users, …) brought together to smoothly design, deploy, ramp-up, operate, and reconfigure the new generation of production systems.

The PERFoRM consortium expects remarkable economic and ecological benefits through the introduction of plug-and-produce component based agility and the migration of existing production systems. Based on the partners combined experience regarding the planning and operation of production systems, industrial middleware, the development and integration of plug-and-produce concepts, sensor and quality control technologies as well as appropriate visualization and monitoring strategies, the potential improvements of the PERFoRM approach in comparison to existing production systems have been estimated. With respect to the short lead time of only three years of the PERFoRM project, it should be noted that it may not be possible to show all impacts and benefits to their full extent.

However, through simulation and four full industrial pilot applications it is PERFoRM intention to show and validate the range of achievable improvements particularly for the performance indicators linked to productivity. See the table below for an aggregation of the aspired project results, related impacts in terms of economic and ecological KPIs with regard to the expectations laid down in the work programme and the related benefits for the partners and the European industry.

The main objective of the work package 1 is to define a vision for an integration and deployment of tools addressing self-adjustment, correction, control of individual machines and robots, and their connection with existing production planning and scheduling systems to demonstrate the flexibility and fast reaction of manufacturing environment to the rapid market changes and increasing products complexity. The benefit of such approach should be demonstrated in multiple manufacturing domains cover many industrial sectors and at the same time should allow the scalability from SME (Small Medium Enterprise) to multi countries companies via a smooth transition from “traditional” hard-wired production shop-floors till the power offered by the new CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) enabled components.

The first part of the work package will be a comprehensive study on existing integrated tools for the management of production systems, communication protocols and standards for data presentation with special focus on manufacturing and product data management models, communication and interoperability protocols.

The key performance indicators (KPI's) are defined below to reflect the impact on the industry and to be able to measure the social / ecological and economic aspect. These are defined for the entire project and in collaboration with the Work Packages 7-10 for each USE-CASE case.

Based on this information, the functional and non-functional requirements of the supporting information are developed technologies and tools defined. As well as the analysis for the best available technologies of the individual use cases. As a result, the guidelines for selecting suitable components based on features, implementation and integration characteristics, deployment efforts and availability specification defined by technical interfaces and supported standards.

The main objective of this work package is to design a system architecture for new innovative production systems (see picture), namely providing the concepts, methods, and a technical framework to meet the required functionalities as defined in WP 1. For this purpose, the research results from previous RandD projects on intelligent production systems and production control, namely GRACE, IDEAS, PRIME, SOCRADES and IMC-AESOP, will be considered as insights and will be harmonized to create the integrated architecture. The importance in this WP is the development of the infrastructure (industrial manufacturing middleware) to support the communication and collaboration among the (hardware and software) production components, as well standard interfaces for supporting plugability of machinery, control systems and data storage. This infrastructure will allow the connectivity, interoperability and plugability of manufacturing components and will act as basis to support the seamless system reconfiguration and enhance the planning, simulation and operational features according to functional requirements from WP1.

Workpackage objectives summary:
• Identification of the influence of humans as flexibility driver in production systems.

• Design the system architecture by harmonizing the research results from previous projects.

• Development of the industrial manufacturing middleware to support the communication and collaboration among the (hardware and software) production components.

• Development of the standard interfaces to support the plugability of (hardware and software) production components.

WP 3 will identify and develop technology adaptors needed to ensure a real time communication between machinery, robots and other entities connected to the industrial middleware. This is especially needed as legacy production systems often are not connected via global standard interfaces. The purpose of this work package is to define methods and develop tools to create the technical feasibility for making machines, robots and other components/resources self-adjusting and quickly reconfigurable. This can be primarily achieved by facilitating the middleware developed in WP2. As existing production entities and systems are not designed to work in the proposed middleware, it is necessary to find methods to implement compliant hardware and software interfaces. Furthermore, in order to achieve self-adjustment capabilities, the decision making process in the production entities and systems needs to be supported by the provision of meaningful real-time information and the capability to incorporate human expert inputs. An important issue in this WP is therefore the accommodation of legacy systems and the import of existing methods and technologies developed in previous EU projects (GRACE, IDEAS, PRIME, Self-Learning, SOCRADES) to define the methods and tools to be developed in this WP.

Workpackage objectives summary:
• Development of adaptors for interfacing, accessing, reconfiguring and controlling robots and other production resources

• Tools and methods to acquire and process real time data from production resources

• Support to decision making by the exploitation of real-time machine information at machine level

• Human expert support and integration at machine level

WP 4 deals with the development of decision rules, simulation, visualization and assessment methods for production systems. New simulation techniques will be introduced to build up an appropriate expandable model to analyze the dynamic behavior of the production system. New visualization and monitoring techniques will be introduced to observe KPIs of the current production system status. Additionally, reconfigurability mechanisms will be introduced to enable fast reconfiguration and flexibility based on manual or automatic decisions.

This work package contributes methods for the support of production planning. These are simulation methods for prediction, forecasting and visualization of plant relevant data to support the reconfiguration of the production system.

This work package aims to harmonize and prototype an appropriate simulation method to analyze the dynamic behavior of a production system. This method must be able to predict the performance of a production system regarding its energy and resource related key figures, production parameters and the integration of field device information. Furthermore, dynamic planning and (re)-scheduling procedures for job-shop production and flexible systems will be harmonized. An essential aspect in this context is the identification of critical internal and external success factors and drivers leading to guidelines and recommendations for implementation of agent-based production systems. Another objective deals with the adaptation of context sensitive visualization and monitoring tools for production data like machine parameters, energy consumption data and process parameters, providing quick assessment and decision support functionalities. The data ought to be processed user group specific and provided immediately, enabling rapid intervention and reaction to changes or disruptions within the production system on an operational level as well as for strategic decision making for production engineers and managers, e.g. as a dynamic dashboard. This work package also comprises recommendations for optimal reconfiguration mechanisms for machinery and robots to be used during the planning phase of new systems as well as for the improvement of existing ones including relevant aspects from the simulation and scheduling methods. The work package objectives also contain the harmonization and standardization of production system models coming from previous projects such as IDEAS and GRACE in an appropriate software environment.

Workpackage objectives summary:
• Harmonization of the multi-objective simulation method including energy-related aspects.

• Derivation of energy and agent-based dynamic planning and (re-)-scheduling procedures.

• Provision of optimal decision support and KPI and functionality visualization.

• Recommendations for optimal reconfiguration and modularization mechanisms for machinery and robots including respective boundaries.

The main objective of work package 5 is the integration of previous development and harmonization results to plan and control the deployment within selected test beds and within the four industrial use cases. The main aim is to integrate the results developed within WP2, 3 and 4 and to prepare the deployment of these results within innovative production systems directly in the different use cases. As an implementation of a new, or even just modified production control will have a direct impact on the production lines of the industrial partners, this work package will ensure a smooth and successful migration.

An integration and deployment process accompanied by a migration strategy needs to define what the migration is aiming towards, it´s justification what is the motivation and how it is influenced by the innovative control system strategy, like “best of breed” and/or consolidate on one system. This will also include how to isolate older-legacy systems and have them integrated, for the more modern innovative system, as far as possible, to act as if they would be one of those. At the same time the old-legacy system should see their surrounding systems as being of the same system generation. In this type of cases and from architectural and functional viewpoints, gateways, APIs and mediators play important roles.

From the business viewpoint, one of the main obstacles for broad implementation of new technologies within production environments is that they may put a high risk of loss of production if not fully tested. To mitigate these risks, WP 5 will deliver a detailed planning for the migration for the four use cases present within this project. For the integrated results from previous work packages, it will be defined which results need further testing and validation before they may be applied to the shop floor. This will be done together with the use case providers (e.g. factory leaders; engineers from factories). Subsequently these technologies will be tested within WP 6. Only after approval from use case leaders within WP 6, these results will be deployed at factory site.

To coordinate the migration progress for the project results in different kinds of production environments, there will be a centralized coordination of the migration progress within WP 5, thus avoiding harmonized results from diverging within different use cases again. This allows the overall validation of the successful migration of technologies not only within the four use cases, but also for some additional show cases within the test beds in WP 6.

Work package objectives summary:
• Integration and harmonization of results from WP 2, 3 and 4

• Identification of technologies to be further tested and validated within WP 6 before they can be applied within use cases

• Detailed planning of migration strategies and deployment of innovative production systems within the four use cases

• Centralized control of the migration progress towards innovative production systems across all use cases

This work package will focus on the verification and validation of the technological developments in relevant production environments to confirm that user requirements are met and to de-risk solutions before they are implemented in operational environments. These demonstrators will also be used for development purposes by providing environments to test and optimize the methods generated in WP2, WP3 and WP4. At the same time, the process of building the demonstrators on existing production environments will provide realistic and valuable information for the development of migration strategies and methodologies in WP5. The process of demonstrating and de-risking the technological solution developed will be incremental, starting with station level demonstrators for self-adaptive machines and robots (Task 6.1) and then evolve to system demonstrators including highly automated assembly (Task 6.2) and large-scale assembly (Task 6.3). The development of the demonstrators in this work package will provide a knowledge base that will be transferred to the development of use cases in WP7, WP8, WP9 and WP10 to facilitate the implementation of technologies in operational environments with minimum disruptions. The demonstrators will be defined (M12) and completed (M24) in time to allow effective transitions of the technology to the industrial use cases.

Work package objectives summary:
• Verify and validate the technologies and methodologies developed in W2-5.

• Demonstrate the engineering feasibility and performance of a reconfigurable system in a relevant environment.

• Provide real data, information and knowledge to improve the technologies and methodologies developed in WP3-5.

• De-risk technologies and build a knowledge base to facilitate the implementation of industrial use cases in WP7-10.

WP 7 is one of the work packages that provides a practical use case and need for actual implementation and evaluation of concepts, methods and technologies developed within the previous work packages of PERFoRM. The Siemens use case focuses on the production of compressors in a highly individual customer market environment.

It is currently characterized by the production of one-of-a-kind-products or small lot sizes. The main production tasks are machining processes and assembly. A high share of manual labor and a high complexity in assembly results from the need of all components to be made available for assembling the final product.

The factory provides an ideal use case for the investigation of handling small lot sizes in an increasingly rapidly changing manufacturing environment with balancing costs, quality and customer demands at the same time.

One major goal is to achieve an increased availability of production equipment along the whole value chain (see picture), and especially in the early steps where individual parts are produced. Downstream from there along the value chain towards the final assembly of highly customized products.

More precise tracking and monitoring of parts and semi-finished products as well as monitoring of production equipment already was identified to be the first necessary steps to increase availability and streamlining the overall value-add process and gain better adaptability, more flexibility and increased resource efficiency.

The main objective of this work package is to implement methodologies and technologies developed in WP2-WP6 to allow the production of different Micro Electric Vehicle architectures (see picture) aiming at establishing the conditions for a near future smart flexible manufacturing of Micro EVs.

Specifically:
• Addressing quick adaptation of the production line from small lots of specific vehicles to larger lots of passenger cars.

• Minimizing human errors when selecting settings and parameters.

• Minimizing the variability of operations such as manual welding of the tubular chassis by introducing a high degree of robotized welding.

• Satisfying the highest automotive quality standards by tracking the incoming parts, sub-modules processes, and integration phases.

• Introducing testing methodologies on sub-modules before their integration.

• Introducing testing and quality evaluation methodologies on final products before delivery.

• Setting a data base for updates.

• Providing a safe, ergonomic and pleasant living environment.

The second use case at Whirlpool will be based on a real factory in which the PERForM approach will be used to establish a real-time monitoring system able to correlate dynamic behavior of the factory to its key performance indicators implementation thus allowing its fast reconfiguration. The major objective for doing this is designing a “Reconfiguration Support System”, which allows deriving suitable actions to take for reconfiguring processes based on the factory KPIs.

Whirlpool is one of Europe’s main producers of consumer white goods (e.g. refrigerator, ovens, cooktops, and washing machines) with a large variety in products and brands. To face the enormous pricing pressure in this market segment, continuous actions need to be undertaken to improve production. Within the production system implemented at Whirlpools sites, a Continuous Improvement Process (CIP) is established, which formalizes this process resulting in a one-year rolling plan. Clearly, in the case of highly agile markets (which white good definitive is) these plans help adapting and reconfiguring the factory to react quickly, and thus can generate significant competitive advantages. To ensure spending available (and strongly limited) capacity for improving measures in the most efficient way, deciding which measures to implement at what stage is a crucial step, and undertaking unnecessary action or solution with little impact needs to be avoided. Currently, these decisions are widely based on the knowledge and experience of involved employees. This does not always guarantee an efficient reconfiguration of production sites, especially as production equipment, challenges and personnel vary widely amongst different sites of Whirlpool and the amount of complexity each factory must deal with is increasing year over year due to the rate of differentiation of products and markets required by the globalized economy.

Therefore, in this use case a new kind of MES will be implemented with the focus to establish a “Reconfiguration Support System” (see picture), which continuously monitors the KPIs of a production environment and provides suggestions for reconfiguration of its components.

Based on those KPIs, creating the reconfiguration plan will be enriched and decision for undertaking specific actions will become more objective. After implementing appropriate measures, the impact of this on the factory KPIs will be easier recognized, generating high acceptance of CIM on a management and shop floor level.

Workpackage objectives summary:
• Conceptual design of “Reconfiguration Support System” to allow identifying measures for adaptation and improvement plan.

• Design and realization of hardware and software to implement “Reconfiguration Support System” based on a CPPS in an exemplary Whirlpool site or production line.

• Testing and evaluation of the applicability of a “Reconfiguration Support System”.

The Use Case is built on an integrated system that can complete a well-defined part of the value adding process chain. The process can be fully automatic and/or supported by manual processing or assistance. Except for the value adding process, cleaning and inspection/measurement is needed to control quality and record process and/or product data. The Use Case will be based on an existing cell built for a dedicated task. This cell will be modified and upgraded to demonstrate a flexible multi-process cell (see picture) for surface improvement methods, e.g. polishing of the flow paths, blades, or parts made from AM, based on an architecture that easily can adapt to process changes, process parameters and component geometry. The high quality and safety standards and strict requirements on traceability of e.g. materials, process data and inspection and other product data will need special care and attention to make this system qualified and approved for aerospace use. To accomplish this, the results from different WPs will be used; the technical and human system solutions from WP2 and WP3 to enable flexibility, the tools for simulation and planning from WP5, and how to perform the integration and deployment as result from WP5. (The results and lessons learned from the test beds will also be valuable before implementing in the industrial use case).

The “micro-flow” concept is designed to be a modular system with a large flexibility potential and be able to be adapted to different kinds of processes and products. The goal is also to make it a unit that can easily be moved to another location when needed. This will require integrated tools and solutions to facilitate fast reconfigurations and reduce time and cost for changeovers and moving from one location to another.

Workpackage objectives summary:
• Validate the CPPS concept and its functions for the demonstrator applications.

• Evaluate product processing flexibility, the lead time to introduce a new product variant.

• Evaluate process flexibility, the time to reconfigure the cell to another process application

• Verify that risk mitigation is effective, and that traceability and product quality is not affected.

WP11 will take care of dissemination, exploitation and standardization of results with a specific focus to maximize business impact, community building and technology standardization. This work package will manage the dissemination and exploitation of the project’s innovation results. It includes the development and implementation of a plan for disseminating and using the foreground knowledge generated along the project lifecycle, which will help to maximize the impact of the project results. Additionally, the results of the project innovation activities will be disseminated to different scientific and industrial communities at various international events and through publications in technical journals, articles for industrial conferences and others. Moreover, to support the dissemination activities and increase the impact of the project outcomes, will establish a community to support the innovation transfer with the help of clustering events and inter-project exchange with related EU projects. It is our intention to use the channels already created by several project members to organize specific events for industry, academy, and the society in general in Europe, MENA region, Africa and South America, the project’s results will also be used, to contribute to related standardization activities.

Work package objectives summary:
• Development and implementation of a business strategy for exploiting the project outcomes maximizing impact.

• Dissemination of project results to the scientific, technical and industrial audience.

• Contribution to related standardization activities.

• Establishment of a community to support PERFoRM innovation transfer.

In the Work Package 12 the Project Coordination and Management will run for the whole duration of the project with a specific focus of ensuring activity development coherently with plans and preventing and mitigating risks. The objective of Project Coordination and Management is to perform overall project government and to establish and maintain a communication and controlling infrastructure.

Work package objectives summary:
• Monitoring, tracking and controlling deviations due to progress-, costs-, and scheduling- changes.

• Managing the project according to approved plans.

• Implementing procedures for quality management.

• Implementing an administration and communication infrastructure to establish a basis for efficient and easy communication within the project, in addition to ensuring that external communication is done and controlled by the project management.

• Performing a procedure for updating and revising the plans every 12 months due to changes and new knowledge. All tasks will be accomplished by using state of the art management instruments and methods (see picture). This should facilitate an unobstructed and successful project and research evolution.