The VERITAS project lays the foundations for optimized design and operation of autonomous, self-organizing and dynamically cooperating smart machines for digital production. Current applications use a central management system to control IoT devices and their interactions. Whereas agile cooperation between individual subsystems enables a high degree of flexibility and versatility in production, their centralized deployment makes IoT devices heavily dependent on the availability and reliability of network connections. For mobile IoT devices in particular, wireless connections in the final meters to the machine present a major challenge. Furthermore, this approach becomes increasingly difficult to manage as the number of machines and the complexity of the software used grow. Accordingly, in order to fully reap the benefits of agile collaboration, it is necessary to rethink the way in which the overall system is managed.

To avoid potential malfunctions in central management structures for digital production, the VERITAS project pursues the following goals:

self-organization of and collaboration between IoT devices

increased resilience of distributed applications against temporary restrictions in network connectivity or failure of individual IoT devices

co‐design and co-management of distributed applications within heterogeneous networks.

To this end, the project partners will explore construction principles for overall systems and methods for self-organization and dynamic aggregation and disaggregation in a group of distributed IoT devices. Furthermore, it will examine and optimize self-organizing software components in machines to allow for fluctuating performance of the network system.