The EU FIRST project has achieved most of the goals planned for the 1st Periodic Report (first 24 months), regarding virtual factory and smart manufacturing research, training and networking activities. The consortium has achieved relevant scientific contributions, created new collaborations and enhanced existing ones, and proposed and implemented well-attended training and networking activities.

The concrete scientific and technical achievements from the first reporting period are established the foundational notions and requirements of interoperability of a virtual factory and operationalizes them. Existing manufacturing-oriented service description languages, service classification, service management, service discovery methods, and service-oriented process verification are reviewed. Related new approaches, architecture, methods are discovered and researched. Some works have been prototyped.