Objective
The present global competitive environment poses formidable challenges to the European manufacturing infrastructure; among others, we single out speed in responding to continuously changing market demands, time-to-market pressure, plant and equipment costs, and the need of amortizing them over longer periods.
We do not believe European manufacturing can cope with the many challenges of the future without radical innovation. The speed of innovation in the Information Technology domain has been increasing over many years when compared to other domains. We believe that leveraging this innovation is essential to develop radically innovative manufacturing plants and processes. We notice an increasing gap between the advent of new ideas and products in IT and their use in manufacturing plant.
Our goal is to bridge this gap: to make manufacturing plants and equipment agile and reconfigurable using multi-agent systems, open platforms, wireless technology and virtual engineering design methods.
Our actions have four prongs:
- Make open approaches and the multi-agent paradigm more robust and demonstrate their feasibility (agent-based mechatronics control technology with embedded intelligence;
-Exploit wireless technology in networking and in novel equipment architectures;
-Develop flows to support the design and operation of the manufacturing plant of the future with particular attention to the simulation of advanced multi-agent systems and automatic code generation for control;
-Develop industrial strength test beds.
Expected benefits include:
-Increased competitiveness of European automation solution providers in face of strong competition from the Far East;
-Increased robustness of the control hardware and software with reduced development times and costs;
-Enhanced reusability and reconfigurability of developed control solutions and improved portability;
-Optimised relationship among industrial manufacturing supply chain.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringcontrol systems
- social sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomation
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringmechatronics
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationsradio technology
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP6-2004-IST-NMP-2
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
GRUGLIASCO
Italy