‘In the world of fire detectors, the improvement we’ve made is a huge increase,’ says Norbert Neumann, the co-founder of Germany’s InfraTec who worked on project FLAME. ‘We see a growing market.’ Neumann isn’t new to the world of fire detectors. He and friends Mathias Heinze and Mathias Krauß first spotted a niche in the market back in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. They were working as a research assistant in the electrical engineering department at Dresden University of Technology. They set up InfraTec and the business blossomed in newly unified Germany.

Twenty years later, Neumann set to wondering whether making detectors from a different material - a different composition of crystals that detect the glow of a fire – could increase the detector’s capacity to sense fire and sound the alarm. The recent status of South Korea as an associated country to EUREKA meant InfraTec could partner up with iBule, a long-standing supplier of crystals for its detectors. ‘The fact that iBule was also an SME was great,’ says Neumann. Founded by chemical engineer Sang-Goo Lee, who studied his post doctorate at Stanford University in the United States, the two companies’ teams communicated together in English and had a lot in common. ‘iBule was very flexible, very interested in looking for new applications and growing,’ says Neumann.

The pair enlisted the support of Ireland’s General Monitors, specialists in high tech gas monitoring and flame detection, to test the new flame detectors for performance.

When a fire starts, it releases hot combustion gases like CO2 and CO. Some of the most popular flame detectors use pyro-electric detectors equipped with narrowband infrared filters. The detectors sense the infrared radiation by reacting to the flame flicker in a frequency range of 2 to 20Hz. But Lee’s team at iBule managed to work out a combination of ferroelectric single crystals – similar to sensors used in ultrasound devices and some flat-panel speakers – which detected fire more accurately and faster. ‘The signal to noise ratio is two to three times higher,’ says Neumann.

The partners say the research was a gamble that was possible through EUREKA backing to secure funding. ‘These experiments were costly but didn’t guarantee results,’ says Lee. The product FLAME developed is now being successfully marketed. iBule has the rights to sell the detectors in Korea. Together the three companies are tapping new export markets. The results are proof that despite daunting costs small companies and the people running them can be some of the most innovative.

Sluga answers: 'Several software solutions exist, but they still bare crucial limitations and do not support manufacturing processes in a broader sense. Let's take a concrete example: in a shop floor where there are about two thousand new operations in a single month, these operations are supported by about ten thousand documents, drawings, work orders, cost calculations, and production protocols. All these information should be available in real time in a more condensed form, at any hierarchical level, in any geographical location.'

He adds: 'Within the project, we've addressed these issues from several perspectives, each partner having a role. The University of Minho, Portugal, took charge of the conceptual development. The industrial partners, Litostroj Power, a hydro power equipment manufacturer, and PPC Buzet, an automotive supplier, were involved in the implementation of the developed system. Our colleagues from Joseph Fourier University, France, were working on the energetic aspects of the project.'

It was ACS (Advanced Consulting Services), a Korean company based in Seoul's digital city, the first high-tech complex in the world for digital technologies, which put theories into practice. Mr. Suk Keun Cha, ACS' dynamic Cofounder and CTO, never misses an occasion to demonstrate the wonders of his technology to his visitors. Touch screens displayed on walls or fitting in hand show ranges of data coming from all around the world: stocks, sales, producing capacities and so on, all updated in real time and communicating wirelessly directly with the manufacturing equipment itself.

Cha likes to demonstrate on a board having pride of place in his office the functioning of the modern global company: 'with our technology you can easily coordinate design in Korea, production in Brazil, planning in the USA, maintenance in France and recycling in China for a product actually distributed and sold in Germany'. Launched in 1988, ACS has a long experience in that field of research, when the Internet was still an emerging technology, it was the first to implement a manufacturing software designed for global operation in South Korea.

Since then the country became the innovation hub that we know and ACS expanded its client portfolio in a way many companies would envy. 'We pledged for the need of an ubiquitous integrated system already ten years ago' says Cha. 'We also helped South Korean companies to stay ahead of the competition: when car constructor Hyundai started to implement our real-time production management technics the rest of the world was still using the old "just-in-time" model'.

After the completion of the project, ACS already started to implement the UES solution within the factories of prestigious clients such as the semiconductor producer Infineon or Schaeffler, the second biggest car-parts manufacturer in the world.  'There is a strong interest in Europe in sectors needing precision based manufacturing, in industries where you are not allowed to make a mistake and the product has to be at a top quality levels,' says Cha, 'and the technology is also available to SMEs, working together as a global network, which constitute the larger part of our clientele'.

The UES technology materialises cutting-edge theories on how work-flow is changing in a globalised economy. Sluga states that most production processes are still based on the paradigm developed by Frederick Taylor at the beginning of the last century, since then known as taylorism and associated to our grand-father’s assembly line work. ‘What is sure is that today’s manufacturing is not the manufacturing of tomorrow, as it is too rigid to adjust to the demands of a globalised market’ says the project coordinator.

In 2011, the Japanese earthquake affected production lines worldwide. They were reports of shortages in supply chains of carmakers and electronic manufacturers in places as far stretched as Louisiana or South Germany, temporarily deprived of Japanese-made parts. Due to their lack of flexibility, the offset of the production to other suppliers in several cases could not be done on time. ‘New achievements in the area of computer science, such as context-aware applications, semantic networks, and artificial intelligence, are also slowly making their way into industry. But the main problem today is that all these applications are isolated, not working together’ adds Sluga.

‘What we call ubiquitous manufacturing systems is one of the emerging production paradigms towards which manufacturing companies are evolving. This evolution in turn will provide new opportunities not only at a technical level but also at a social one. With UES, potentially everyone in a factory is a “coordinator” and the traditional role of the chief operator is abolished’ says Sluga. ‘We are moving from hierarchical to decentralized decision-making. There are several competing models for the future, ubiquitous manufacturing being only one of them, and it is too early to tell which one will succeed. Yet the question is not “if?”, but “when?”.’

Deregulation of the energy market in Europe has led to much increased pressure on distribution companies to keep their costs under control. While existing and upgraded supervisory control and data-acquisition (SCADA) systems enable gas suppliers to ensure proper operation of their networks overall, reliable and correct data about when and how much gas is used is crucial to enable further analyses and accurate forecasting.

In particular, gas distributors need to be able to forecast gas consumption up to 48 hours ahead and negotiate wholesale gas purchases accordingly - large penalties are applied if forecasts are more than 8% out. However, while forecasting programs and systems have already been available, their cost and complexity have limited their use to large organisations.

The consortium behind the EUREKA project therefore set out to develop a new generation of low-cost yet easy-to-use systems based on state-of-the-art technology that could be used by smaller distributors.

Slovenian project leader Solvera Lynx supplies energy data management software to gas distributors, industrial users and gas network operators. German partner Feingeraetebau Tritschler specialises in explosion-proof electrical measuring equipment for energy networks, particularly natural gas. Gas-demand forecasting software came from South Korean software partner Wooam.Com.

"All three companies involved are SMEs and not able to fund the work required themselves," explains Tomaz Ostir of Solvera Lynx. "EUREKA enabled us to access public funding. We have participated in EU Framework Projects but EUREKA offers the best programme for small companies that do not have enough employees to deal with all the paperwork required by the Commission. It is a really good way to help small companies to develop competitive new products. The EUREKA approach was also much appreciated as the minimal bureaucracy involved allowed the partners to focus on communications between themselves and development of the new products."

Specific advances in the EUREKA project include development of an automatic combined data-logging and volume-correction system able to function in a potentially explosive atmosphere at the consumer premises, use of the public GPRS mobile phone network for particularly inexpensive transmission of data from often very remote sites, and advanced algorithms for the business processes required.

Measuring gas consumption directly is complicated because volume depends on temperature and pressure, requiring correction at the user premises to ensure the consumers pays the correct amount. The new meter combines both volume correction and data logging in a single explosion-proof unit that provides its output directly to the distribution centre over the general packet radio service (GPRS) mobile phone network. This is the first time all these functions have been combined in a single unit.

"We used GPRS because it is now a widespread technology with a very low cost of data transfer," says Oštir. "It enables us to send meter readings of only a few bytes at a much lower cost than even an SMS text message." Moreover, the automatic system enables regular data transmission - once a day or even once an hour - over the existing public GPRS network far away from city centres without having to install additional communications lines.

The resulting data is then interpreted in the distribution centre using advanced algorithms developed in the EUREKA project to provide users with daily, weekly and annual consumption with graphic representation if required. Distributors can use the data on individual consumption not only for billing purposes but also to help inform and educate consumers about reducing energy needs - an obligation the EU has now put on energy suppliers. More importantly, it allows optimisation for load planning and enables accurate estimation of overall gas consumption up to 48 hours ahead based on current and historical user data and weather forecasts. Before such estimates where often only rule of thumb. The system can be fully customised to different conditions - tariff systems, business information systems, languages - in European and non-European energy markets.

The resulting total solution offers many benefits for smaller gas-distribution companies and enables them to offer better service to their customers. At the same time, it allows SMEs to compete with the large energy distributors, providing an overall competitive advantage in Europe and so reducing prices.

The hardware developed in INTELLGAS is now being commercialised in Germany, Austria and Slovenia. The software is available in Croatia and Slovenia and will soon be delivered in Austria. "The software is finalised but we are continuously developing new features as regulations differ by geographical area and we customise solutions," says Oštir.