The European research project vf-OS began in October 2016 and was completed in October 2019. It is also part of the European Commission's program “Factories of the future” and intends, like the its name indicates, to make the factories modernize and become more prepared for the Industry 4.0 paradigm.
This project, which has the support of 14 partners from different countries, intends to create a platform whose purpose is to virtualize factories. For that, it firstly needs to ingest the factory's own processes, the resources it has, possibly the manufacturing plans, but above all, the processes that are inherent to the manufacturing itself.
Thus, the vf-OS project developed an Open Operating System for Virtual Factories (vf-OS), composed of a Virtual Factory System Kernel (vf-SK), a Virtual Factory Application Programming Interface (vf-API) and a Virtual Factory Middleware (vf-MW). Within the scope of this project, Caixa Mágica is responsible for developing the most crucial component of it, which consists of creating an SDK (Software Development Kit), whose purpose is to centralise and retain the functionalities so that it is feasible to develop such applications.
In addition, CMS has also developed a graphic development environment, “Studio”, which consists of a graphical interface for building applications (IDE) aligned with the current state of the art, and which includes, for example, code writing mechanisms, graphical interfaces and processes using drag & drop, debugging and graphical integration with other components developed in the project.
Also in this project, CMS is responsible for developing a community support application for engagement of developers. This application makes available all the code that is developed, as well as tutorials, documentation, videos, examples, and other elements so that it is possible to help the community to work with those applications.
CMS employees involved in this project:
Carlos Coutinho, Miguel Tavares, Vítor Viana, Abel Tenera,
Nikolai Glazkov e Patrícia Silva.