Project · DeFacto
Design Automation for Smart Factories
A Horizon 2020 MSCA project on rigorous, compositional design automation for smart factories, combining assume-guarantee contracts, formal methods, simulation and optimisation to engineer high-assurance cyber-physical production systems.
Period2020 – 2023StatusCompletedFundingHorizon 2020 · Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship · European Commission · grant 894237
Objective
DeFacto (Design Automation for Smart Factories) addressed a central problem of Industry 4.0: production lines are becoming complex cyber-physical systems, but engineering methods must still provide strong guarantees of correctness, safety and dependability while coping with heterogeneous components and uncertain behaviour. The project developed modelling paradigms, scalable algorithms and software tools for design automation in smart manufacturing and, more generally, autonomous cyber-physical systems.
The University of Verona coordinated the project. The institutional project record lists Franco Fummi and Michele Lora as participants, while the European Commission records DeFacto as Horizon 2020 grant agreement 894237, running from 1 October 2020 to 30 September 2023.
Technical approach
DeFacto centred its methodology on assume-guarantee contracts. A contract captures what a component assumes about its environment and what it guarantees when those assumptions hold. This gives designers a rigorous interface for composing components, refining requirements and analysing large systems without flattening the whole design into a single monolithic model.
The project combined contract-based reasoning with formal methods, simulation and optimisation. The resulting workflow was intended to support modular and hierarchical design, requirements validation, architecture exploration, control-software synthesis and virtual prototyping of cyber-physical production systems.
Research outcomes
The project generated a substantial body of work on contract-based requirements, service-oriented manufacturing, production scheduling and reconfiguration, automated warehouse co-design and architectural exploration. CORDIS lists ten conference publications among the reported project results, and the 2024 DATE paper Design Automation for Cyber-Physical Production Systems: Lessons Learned from the DeFacto Project explicitly consolidates the methods and experience developed during the fellowship.
The related-publications section below is generated from the site’s bibliography and contains the DeFacto papers currently curated for the CISD site.