Workpackage 2 – Smart design & organization

This workpackage focuses on issues related to the development (design and production) of products, systems and services by taking into account the whole lifecycle of the product and the related organizations.

On the one hand, all of these activities are strongly impacted by the rapid development of digital technologies, the emergence of data available in very large quantities, the development of robotics and by the immersion of digital tools allowing interaction between the actors and technological systems. These developments are leading to a paradigm shift going further than new sharing of information, but sharing of intelligence and decision-making that we are witnessing through new generations of autonomous and self-adaptive resources and new principles of smart products.

On the other hand, environmental issues generate an obligation to reduce the use of resources, while enabling customers’ expectations to be met to the greatest possible extent. It is therefore necessary to integrate the following aspects from the product and process design phases: adaptability of the production to customer demands, capability to select in real time the most efficient production solutions in relation to the various variabilities generated by providers, customers, internal resources, etc., reduction of the environmental impact by constantly adapting to regulatory changes.

The scientific issues will focus on the study of new ways of designing and producing products/ systems/services by integrating the advantages of the latest advanced technologies in the digital field in terms of knowledge management and representation. The efforts will be concentrated on the development of a framework that is consistent with the targeted challenges, providing new multi-view, multiscale and dynamic models supporting those processes. These approaches will be based on integrated modelling of the different flows involved during the whole product lifecycle, as well. The robustness of the optimization solutions will be one of the qualifying items of the workpackage proposals. Finally, concepts enabling reductions of the environmental impact (circular economy, reverse logistics) will be introduced at all the steps in production (design and manufacturing).

 Priority topics and actions

• Design of autonomous, mobile and reconfigurable industrial systems

 Examples of other topics and actions of interest

• Design / Optimization of parts with integrated functionalities taking into account the process requirements
• Circular economy
• Immersive digital tools in industrial activity: uses and performances
• Collaborative robotics
• New information and decision-making models