Glossary
This glossary explains the terms used on this site and in the MaaSAI deliverables. Each entry names the deliverable it is based on, and solution names link to the corresponding solution page.
Project and Business Terms
Section titled “Project and Business Terms”| Term | Definition | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Broker | Organisation role in the Cloud MaaS Marketplace (for example an EDIH or a professional or industrial cluster) that supports and assists the interactions among MaaS Providers, MaaS Consumers, Solution Developers, Suite Providers and Service Experts. | D5.1 |
| Business Process (BP) | A pilot process that D4.5 analyses to identify its problems, their root causes and the MaaSAI solutions that can address them. Business processes are numbered per pilot (BP01, BP02, and so on). | D4.5 |
| CMM Operator | Administrative role that manages and monitors the Cloud MaaS Marketplace (CMM), supports organisations and users, and enforces the marketplace rules. It also answers user requests such as organisation validation, provider approval and approval of resource publication. | D5.1; D5.2 |
| MaaS Consumer | Organisation that uses the manufacturing resources of MaaS Providers by renting them. In the marketplace it explores, discovers and accesses resources and services from distributed MaaS Providers. | D4.1; D5.1 |
| MaaS Provider | Organisation that offers its manufacturing resources (for example equipment, data or software) on a rental basis. In the marketplace it describes, promotes and offers these resources and collaborates with MaaS Consumers. | D4.1; D5.1 |
| MaaSAI | The project “Agile Manufacturing as a Service through AI Autonomous Agents”, which develops the MaaSAI System. | D4.1; D5.1 |
| MaaSAI Environment | One of the three environments in which MaaSAI solutions are instantiated: the Cloud MaaS Marketplace environment, the MaaS Consumer environment and the MaaS Provider environment. D5.1 also calls them “tiers”; on this site, “tier” refers to the Cloud, Fog and Edge tiers. See Architecture Environments. | D5.1 |
| MaaSAI Solution | One of the individual tools that make up the MaaSAI System. D4.1 (Table 1) lists 23 solutions, with the names and codes used on this site, and D5.2 describes each of them; see the Solutions Suite. | D4.1; D5.2 |
| MaaSAI System | The complete digital system developed by the project to automate and facilitate the interactions between MaaS Providers and MaaS Consumers. D4.1 describes it as composed of the MaaSAI Cloud MaaS Marketplace, the MaaSAI Provider Suite and the MaaSAI Consumer Suite. | D4.1 |
| Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) | Business model in which companies offer their manufacturing resources as services that other companies can rent, instead of each company buying and maintaining its own equipment. | D4.1; D5.2 |
| Service Expert | Organisation role in the Cloud MaaS Marketplace that describes, promotes and offers expert services to help MaaS Providers and MaaS Consumers exploit the MaaS ecosystem. | D5.1 |
| Solution Developer | Organisation role in the Cloud MaaS Marketplace that describes and maintains solutions ready to be used by MaaS Providers or MaaS Consumers. | D5.1 |
| Suite Provider | Organisation role in the Cloud MaaS Marketplace that groups solutions and services into packages for MaaS Providers and MaaS Consumers. | D5.1 |
Technical Concepts
Section titled “Technical Concepts”| Term | Definition | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Application, Control, Information and Security domains | The four functional domains into which D5.1 groups the consumer- and provider-side solutions (the marketplace solutions are drawn in a separate cloud block): Application (planning, simulation, digital twin, life-cycle and maintenance logic), Control (coordination and monitoring between consumers and providers, centred on the agents), Information (collection and harmonisation of ERP, MES and operational data) and Security (blockchain, smart contracts and secure messaging). See Architecture Overview. | D5.1 §3.4 |
| Autonomous Agent | Software agent that acts autonomously on behalf of a MaaS Consumer or MaaS Provider to negotiate the conditions of a manufacturing service, such as price, production capacity and delivery times. D6.1 implements them as orchestrator agents (MCOA, MPOA) that deploy the negotiating MaaS Consumer Agent (MCA) and MaaS Provider Agent (MPA), and calls them collectively “MaaS Agents”. | D4.1; D6.1 §5 |
| Autonomous Cell | In the metal-machining pilot described in D4.1, a monitoring cell connected to a manufacturing machine and equipped with IoT, optical and haptic sensors, whose data are used to calculate the machine’s OEE and to obtain AI-based improvement suggestions. Not to be confused with “MaaS Autonomous Cell Configurator”, a name that D4.1 (Table 3) uses for the MaaS Workspace Configurator (MWC). | D4.1 |
| Business Event Webhook | Single HTTP endpoint of the Smart Contracts Toolkit (SCT) through which external services, such as the Cloud MaaS Marketplace (CMM), submit agreement lifecycle events and production updates as JSON payloads, which are validated and turned into blockchain transactions. | D12.1 §6 |
| Cloud tier | Tier of the MaaSAI architecture in which D5.1 (Figure 54) draws the marketplace solutions, the MaaS agents and the Control Panels (CP). The M20 deliverables use their own layer names and place some solutions differently: D8.1, for example, places the DIP and the MaaS Blockchain in its cloud layer, and D6.1 hosts each orchestrator agent within its user’s infrastructure. | D5.1 (Figure 54); D6.1; D8.1 |
| Digital Passport (DPP) | Passport that acts as the live data hub of a specific asset, for example storing its manuals and visualising its technical data. Passports are designed and deployed per asset with the Digital Industrial Passport Designer (DIP); D8.1 calls the deployed passports “Digital Product Passports (DPPs)”. | D8.1 §5 |
| Digital Twin | Virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronised at specified frequencies and fidelities (definition of the Digital Twin Consortium, cited in D5.1). In MaaSAI, digital twins are designed with the Digital Twins Designer (DTD). | D5.1 |
| Digital Wallet | Blockchain identity of a user, to which roles and permissions are assigned. The Smart Contracts Toolkit (SCT) generates an Ethereum wallet server-side for each user at registration and registers the user on-chain with the appropriate role. | D5.1; D12.1 §6 |
| Edge tier | Tier of the MaaSAI architecture that handles MES data and in which D5.1 (Figure 54) draws R3T, MWC and DIP. The Data Integrator (DI) and EDGE Data Storage (DS) sit at the boundary between the Fog and Edge tiers. | D5.1 (Figure 54) |
| Explainable AI (xAI) | AI whose results come with human-readable explanations. D4.1 associates xAI with the autonomous agents; D6.1 plans XAI explanations of why the Recommendation System (RS) recommends a provider and how the criteria weights influence the ranking. | D4.1; D6.1 §4 |
| Fog tier | Intermediate tier of the MaaSAI architecture in which D5.1 (Figure 54) draws, among others, the planners (MCP, MPP), SCS, PMT, LCT, DTD, PSM, MSB and SCT. D8.1 describes a “Fog / Edge Layer”, and D12.1 describes its solutions as operating at the edge level. | D5.1 (Figure 54); D8.1; D12.1 |
| Generative AI | Generative models that D6.1 plans to introduce in the Recommendation System (RS), so that buyers can express sourcing requests in natural language that the system translates into structured ranking parameters. | D6.1 §4 |
| Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life-Cycle Costing (LCC) | Assessment of the environmental impacts (LCA) and of the costs (LCC) of products and processes over their life cycle, both supported by the LCA-LCC Toolkit (LCT). | D5.1; D12.1 §5 |
| MaaS Consumer Orchestrator Agent (MCOA) | Orchestrator agent that acts on behalf of a MaaS Consumer and deploys instances of the negotiating MaaS Consumer Agent (MCA). It is hosted within the infrastructure of its user, giving it access to real-time data from the local production environment. | D6.1 §5 |
| MaaS Ontology | Unified semantic model used to describe and harmonise data across MaaSAI solutions. The MaaS Dynamic Catalogue (MDC) uses it to describe MaaS resources, and the DIP uses it to harmonise data (D5.1 §3.3). Not the same as the MDC, which is the catalogue solution. | D5.1 |
| MaaS Provider Orchestrator Agent (MPOA) | Orchestrator agent that acts on behalf of a MaaS Provider and deploys instances of the negotiating MaaS Provider Agent (MPA). It is hosted within the infrastructure of its user, giving it access to real-time data from the local production environment. | D6.1 §5 |
| MaaS Smart Planners | Name that D12.1 uses for the MaaS Consumer Planner (MCP) and the MaaS Provider Planner (MPP) together. Both optimise the production schedule; the MCP also considers subcontracting operations or the entire product to a Provider. | D12.1 §2 |
| Machine Health Index (MHI) | Index from 0 to 100, computed by the Predictive Maintenance Toolkit (PMT), that summarises a machine’s health status in a single measure. It is mapped to four states (healthy, watch, degraded, critical) and is designed to be interpretable by operators without statistical knowledge. | D12.1 §4.2 |
| Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) | Metric of machine effectiveness calculated from availability (working time), performance (production cycle) and quality (units produced “ok” versus “nok”). | D4.1 |
| Security and Communication Layer | Layer present in both the MaaS Consumer and MaaS Provider environments, grouping PSM, MSB and SCT: it handles the traceability of transactions through blockchain, validates agreements through smart contracts and uses secure messaging for reliable data transmission. D5.1 (Figure 55) labels it “MaaS Security Layer”. | D5.1 |
| Smart Contract | Program executed on the blockchain that encodes a manufacturing agreement and governs its lifecycle transitions, such as approval, production updates, quality checkpoints and completion. The Smart Contracts Toolkit (SCT) receives finalised agreements from the Cloud MaaS Marketplace (CMM) and propagates them to the MaaS Blockchain (MSB) for registration. | D12.1 §6 |
| TiRex | Time-series transformer at the core of the prediction engine of the Predictive Maintenance Toolkit (PMT). It forecasts several signals simultaneously without prior training (zero-shot) and returns a probability distribution for each predicted time step. | D12.1 §4.2 |
| Workflow journey | Feature of the Cloud MaaS Marketplace (CMM) designed to configure user journeys according to the workflows the CMM supports, guiding the user step by step; D6.1 reports a first version for a predefined workflow. | D6.1 §2 |
Solution Names and Aliases
Section titled “Solution Names and Aliases”This site uses one name and one code per solution. The deliverables sometimes use other names or acronyms for the same solution; the table lists them, with the deliverable where each appears, to help readers match the deliverables to the pages of this site.
| Solution | Code | Other names used in the deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud MaaS Marketplace | CMM | ”MaaS Cloud Marketplace” (D5.1); “MaaS Web Portal” (D5.1, Figure 54); “MaaS MarketPlace” (D5.1, Figure 55) |
| Control Panels | CP | ”Controls Panel” (D4.5); “MaaS Control Panel” (D5.1); “MCP” (D5.2, Tables 21–24, Figure 41 and the implementation viewpoint) |
| Data Analytics | DA | ”DAVE” (D10.1, Figure 13) |
| Data Integrator | DI | ”Data Integration and Storage” (D5.1, Figure 55) |
| Digital Industrial Passport Designer | DIP | ”Digital Passport Designer” (D4.1); “Digital Passport” (D5.1, Figure 55); “DIPD” (D5.2, D8.1) |
| Digital Twins Designer | DTD | ”Digital Twin Designer” (D5.1); “Prediction Tools and Digital Twin” (D5.1, Figure 55) |
| EDGE Data Storage | DS | ”Data EDGE storage” (D4.5); “EDS” (D5.1, D5.2, D8.1); “DS_P” (D8.1, Figure 14) |
| LCA-LCC Toolkit | LCT | ”LCA” (D4.5); “LCA/LCC Registry” (D5.1, Figures 1 and 54); “LCA-LCC” (D5.2) |
| MaaS Blockchain | MSB | ”MB”, “MBC” (D5.2) |
| MaaS Collaboration Hub | MCH | ”MaaSAI Cloud Hub” (D4.5) |
| MaaS Consumer Agent | MCA | ”CA” (D4.5); “MaaS C Agent” (D5.1) |
| MaaS Consumer Planner | MCP | ”MaaS Smart Planners”, with the MPP (D12.1) |
| MaaS Dynamic Catalogue | MDC | ”Dynamic Catalogue”, “DC” (D4.5) |
| MaaS Provider Agent | MPA | ”Maas Producer Agent” (D4.5, Figures 40 and 45) |
| MaaS Provider Planner | MPP | ”MaaS Smart Planners”, with the MCP (D12.1) |
| MaaS Supply Chain Simulator | SCS | ”MaaS Supply Chain Simulation” (D4.1); “Simulation” (D5.1, Figure 55) |
| MaaS Workspace Configurator | MWC | ”MaaS Autonomous Cell Configurator” (D4.1, Table 3); “Workspace Configurator” (D4.1, D5.1); “MaaS Work Cell Configurator” (D5.2) |
| Point-to-Point Secure Messaging | PSM | ”Secure Message Toolkit”, “Secure MSG” (D5.1); “PSC”, “PPSC” (D5.2) |
| Predictive Maintenance Toolkit | PMT | ”PTM” (D5.2, Figure 51) |
| Recommendation System | RS | ”MRS”, “RC” (D5.2) |
| Remote Monitoring and Control | RMC | ”Remote Monitoring Control” (D4.1, D5.1) |
| Repair-Reuse-Recycle Toolkit | R3T | ”MaaS R3” (D5.1, Figure 54); “R3” (D5.1, Figure 54; D5.2); “RRR” (D5.2) |
| Smart Contracts Toolkit | SCT | ”Smart Contract (SC)” (D5.1, Figure 24); “MSC” (D5.2) |
Notes on shared and overlapping names:
- In D5.2, Tables 21–24, Figure 41 and the Control Panels section of the implementation viewpoint, “MCP” refers to the Control Panels. Elsewhere, MCP is the MaaS Consumer Planner.
- D6.1 uses “MaaS Agents” for the MCA and MPA together with their orchestrator agents (MCOA, MPOA).
- D12.1 uses “MaaS Smart Planners” for the MCP and MPP together, and D4.5 (Table 15) refers to a “MaaSAI Planner tool” without distinguishing the two planners.
- This site uses “DS” for EDGE Data Storage, while several deliverables use “EDS”.
Standards, Systems and Reference Architectures
Section titled “Standards, Systems and Reference Architectures”| Term | Definition | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Asset Administration Shell (AAS) | Digital representation of physical and logical assets for Industry 4.0 environments; its metamodel is specified in IEC 63278-1. | D16.4 |
| CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) | Pre-standard developed in a CEN workshop: a publicly available document that specifies the key characteristics and requirements of products, systems or services, whose development does not require full consensus of all stakeholders. D16.4 identifies a CWA as an opportunity for MaaSAI. | D16.4 |
| Digital Twin Consortium Platform Stack | Architectural framework of the Digital Twin Consortium for designing digital twin systems, reviewed in D5.1 as an input to the MaaSAI architecture. | D5.1 |
| DIN SPEC 27070 | Guidelines enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to participate effectively and securely in digital manufacturing marketplaces. | D16.4 |
| Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) | Enterprise system that, together with MES, the Data Integrator (DI) connects to the MaaSAI environment in a continuous, bidirectional data flow. | D5.1; D8.1 |
| IEC 62264 / ISA-95 | Standard establishing models and terminology for integrating enterprise and control systems. The EDGE Data Storage (DS) is compatible with ISA-95. | D16.4; D8.1 |
| IEC 62541 (OPC UA) | OPC Unified Architecture: a platform-independent, service-oriented architecture for secure and reliable data exchange across all levels of industrial communication. | D16.4 |
| Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) | Open, standards-based reference architecture for industrial Internet systems, published by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). It is the main reference architecture of MaaSAI, and D5.2 adopts it as its guiding methodology. | D5.1; D5.2 |
| International Data Spaces Reference Architecture Model (IDS-RAM) | Reference architecture model of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) for data spaces, which enable secure and voluntary data sharing. Reviewed in D5.1 as an input to the MaaSAI architecture. | D5.1 |
| ISO 14040 / ISO 14044 | Life-cycle assessment standards, listed in D4.1 among the supporting technologies of the LCA-LCC Toolkit (LCT). | D4.1 |
| ISO 23247 | Digital Twin Framework for Manufacturing: a framework and reference architecture for implementing digital twins in manufacturing environments. D4.1 and D16.4 cite ISO 23247-1:2021 as an existing standard with which project outputs should comply. | D4.1; D16.4 |
| ISO 59040:2025 | Circular economy standard defining a Product Circularity Data Sheet for communicating the circularity performance of products across supply chains. | D16.4 |
| ISO/IEC 20922 (MQTT) | Message Queuing Telemetry Transport: a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol for constrained devices and networks. Point-to-Point Secure Messaging (PSM) is MQTT-based. | D16.4; D8.1 |
| ISO/IEC TR 24028 | Overview of trustworthiness concepts in AI systems, including transparency, robustness and interpretability. | D16.4 |
| ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 | International standard for architecture descriptions of systems and software. The MaaSAI architecture is described according to it through four viewpoints: Business, Usage, Functional and Implementation. | D5.1; D5.2; D16.4 |
| Manufacturing Execution System (MES) | Manufacturing system that, together with ERP, the Data Integrator (DI) connects to the MaaSAI environment. | D5.1 |
| OpenFog Reference Architecture | Reference architecture of the OpenFog Consortium for fog computing, reviewed in D5.1 as an input to the MaaSAI architecture. | D5.1 |
| Reference Architectural Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) | Model introduced by Platform Industrie 4.0 that maps the aspects of Industrie 4.0 in a three-dimensional framework, published as DIN SPEC 91345. One of the reference architectures the MaaSAI architecture aligns with. | D5.1; D16.4 |
| Technology Readiness Level (TRL) | Scale expressing the maturity of a technology. Solution pages give the level reported for the first release in D6.1, D8.1, D10.1 and D12.1. | D5.1; D6.1; D8.1; D10.1; D12.1 |