knowlEdge Project - Concept, Methodology and Innovations for Artificial Intelligence in Industry 4.0

AI is one of the biggest megatrends towards the 4th industrial revolution. Although these technologies promise business sustainability as well as product and process quality, it seems that the ever-changing market demands, the complexity of technologies and fair concerns about privacy, impede broad application and reuse of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models across the industry. To break the entry barriers for these technologies and unleash its full potential, the knowlEdge project will develop a new generation of AI methods, systems, and data management infrastructure. Subsequently, as part of the knowlEdge project we propose several major innovations in the areas of data management, data analytics and knowledge management including (i) a set of AI services that allows the usage of edge deployments as computational and live data infrastructure as well as a continuous learning execution pipeline on the edge, (ii) a digital twin of the shop-floor able to test AI models, (iii) a data management framework deployed along the edge-to-cloud continuum ensuring data quality, privacy and confidentiality, (iv) Human-AI Collaboration and Domain Knowledge Fusion tools for domain experts to inject their experience into the system, (v) a set of standardisation mechanisms for the exchange of trained AI models from one context to another, and (vi) a knowledge marketplace platform to distribute and interchange trained AI models. In this paper, we present a short overview of the EU Project knowlEdge - Towards Artificial Intelligence powered manufacturing services, processes, and products in an edge-to-cloud-knowledge continuum for humans [in-the-loop], which is funded by the Horizon 2020 (H2020) Framework Programme of the European Commission under Grant Agreement 957331. Our overview includes a description of the project’s main concept and methodology as well as the envisioned innovations.