Innovative Product-Service design using manufacturing intelligence

Topic description

Scope:

Specific challenge:Manufacturing intelligence requires a high integration of (ICT-based) engineering tools and secure middleware solutions that facilitate easy, ubiquitous (e.g. Cloud-enabled) and fast sharing of product and process information/knowledge across the entire lifecycle and among all actors involved. Today's ever faster product lifecycles and ever higher quality requirements necessitate manufacturing engineering capability and knowledge that is able to exploit to the maximum the concurrency of product and service engineering with immediate, cross-disciplinary feedback loops to relevant shop floor knowledge. Also end-users feedback and requirements should be taken into account.

Scope: Research should aim at developing open, multi-disciplinary and holistic product-service engineering environments with the following features:

-          Collaborative management of engineering knowledge and its multi-directional exchange between product design, service design and manufacturing, enabled by rapid search for design functionality and reusability.

-          Tools and methodologies to effectively involve customers, suppliers and other relevant organisations across the value chain.

-          Multi-disciplinary search, simulation and optimisation (e.g. including modularity and reusability as optimisation parameters) of designs and innovative visualisation tools involving intuitive tools.

-          Quantification of overall (time-to-market) improvements and reduction of the lifecycle CO₂ footprint of new products.

For this topic, proposals should include an outline of the initial exploitation and business plans, which will be developed further in the proposal project.

Activities expected to focus on Technology Readiness Level 4-6.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 3 and 6 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected impact:

The impact on the areas of application of the projects is expected to be:

                Improved time-to-market for European manufacturers.

                Improved sustainability across the entire product-service lifecycle.

                Improved knowledge sharing across product design, manufacturing and product-service lifecycle.

                New and better product-service offerings addressing customer needs.

                Increased support for open standards targeting security and interoperability of shared engineering data.

Type of action: Research & Innovation Actions

Contractual Public-Private Partnerships (cPPPs)
FoF