Intelligent advanced manufacturing laboratory

Machines, robots and, in general, manufacturing resources integrated in Industry 4.0 applications generate an immense volume of communication, both horizontally and vertically, as well as data susceptible to be exploited. Horizontally, machines are connected with other machines, material flow management systems and inspection systems to form a unit that works in a coordinated manner. Vertical integration of automated production is necessary to enable constant process monitoring and the integration of additional IoT services.

The evolution of manufacturing technologies and models within the Industry 4.0 concept is currently a source of constant demand from the companies that make up the productive fabric of an economy seeking competitiveness. Under this conceptual umbrella of Industry 4.0 lies a new concept of manufacturing in which the process, the product and the production environment are aligned and connected, and are no longer treated separately. This allows more resource-efficient production, with increasingly customised products.
In general, current production lines in small and medium-sized manufacturing companies (whether automated or robotised) are designed to achieve high production rates with little or no product variation. Product changes require the whole process to be adapted; they are made slowly and require multiple manual changes and adjustments to the production process. Mass production was based on manufacturing large volumes of only one or a few variants of a product. However, there has long been a shift towards batch manufacturing of different products, each with its own characteristics, in ever smaller quantities, driven by new demand for increasingly customised and exclusive products. There is a clear trend towards customised manufacturing while keeping costs low. Customers increasingly demand customised products, which means multiplying the range of products manufactured.
The “Intelligent advanced manufacturing laboratory” project aims to develop an environment in which these technologies can be applied in a unified way in a real scenario, offering a test bed for their cooperative research and application.
This cooperative aspect makes the project particularly novel, since until now these lines of research have been developed in isolation, given the impossibility of finding infrastructures in which to demonstrate the power of the synergy resulting from their combination. It is therefore a distinctive project, as it brings together within a single framework the main research areas needed to make progress towards results that drive innovation in companies’ production processes.

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