Manufacturing of products nowadays has become increasingly complex and it needs to be flexible due to an increasing diversity of product use and product portfolios, customer demand for more customised products and shorter time-to-market requirements. To face these challenges, there is a need for, on the one hand, adaptive and smart manufacturing systems and products with features for intelligent reconfiguration of production processes and products and, on the other hand, for feedback from product use to production and design stages. In order to improve the manufacturability and reconfigurability of products, the product designers need to have more information about how the product use affects the life cycle of a product and how the design of the product affects the production processes. Currently, product use and product production activities are often separated, which is leading to low efficiency and high costs for both users and manufacturers, especially for those acting at the global market. Some of these required optimisations can be carried out by adjusting control and others require the reconfiguration of products.
The SAFIRE project has addressed two related technology challenges for factories of the future that present new opportunities for improving production, products and services: 1) Interconnected Systems of Production Systems within smart manufacturing environments that have hardware and software requirements to achieve specific business objectives e.g. scheduling, power consumption, throughput, and maintenance; and 2) Connected Product Networks where networked smart products collect data, can be adapted in the field, and can deliver extended services to customers through optimisation of smart product performance parameters and customisation of products to environments, usage patterns and other dynamic factors.
Key outcomes of the project have been the development of cloud-based analytics and reconfiguration capabilities with both reactive and predictive reconfiguration for both production systems and smart products, providing flexible run-time reconfiguration decisions during production rather than pre-planned at production planning time, and real-time reconfiguration decisions for optimisation of performance and real-time production and product functions. By performing reconfiguration in the cloud, continuous optimisation of the system has been achieved, which enables far better reconfiguration control and accuracy than if performed in either a pre-planned or online manner.
