DiManD aims to develop a high-quality multidisciplinary, multi-professional and cross-sectorial research and training framework for Europe with the purpose of improving Europe’s industrial competitiveness by designing and implementing an integrated programme in the area of intelligent informatics driven manufacturing that will form the benchmark for training future Industrie 4.0 practitioners.
To achieve this, the consortium brings together a multidisciplinary and multi-sector, pan-European partnership drawing skills from world leading research centres across Europe with an established track record in multidisciplinary and internationally-leading transformative research supported by a number of high value multinational manufacturing companies and small and medium size companies. The aim is supported by the following objectives:
1. To provide a comprehensive and appropriate set of training and development activities for ESRs comprising network-wide modules, courses and events, both technical and non-technical, and specific development activities, including the Integrated Training and Demonstration Platform as a legacy on which future developments can be built, to elevate the status of ESRs to become Digital Manufacturing Ambassadors (WP2).
2. To create the system framework to standardised architectures and methodologies that facilitate the development of cyber-physical production resources and the necessary ICT infrastructure that enables the seamless integration of these into cyber-physical systems (WP3).
3. To design and develop a control concept and underpinning data models for autonomous behaviour adaptation of distributed manufacturing systems based on context-aware autonomous systems (WP4).
4. To analyse and apply new ICT trends, such as Big Data, Cyber Physical Systems and Data Mining, in manufacturing systems to enable more efficient processing of data for control and configuration and advanced diagnostics and monitoring purposes that at the same time provide security and privacy by design without compromising the need to share data between different organisations in the manufacturing chain (WP5), advancing technology from TRL 1 to 8.
5. To ensure that the results of the DiManD programme are effectively communicated to European industry, associations, stakeholders (including universities, research and technology organisations), and the public domain. To provide effective academic dissemination for the ESR individual projects including major papers in high impact open access journals and presentations at leading national and internationally leading conferences (WP6).
The research programme will deliver a dramatic step change by increasing manufacturing productivity and enhancing global competitiveness of the European manufacturing sector as well as contributing to job creation by offering, for the first time, a new holistic approach to both research and training in Manufacturing Informatics. It breaks with traditional approaches to research and is predicated on three key research challenges: big data analytics; industrial Internet of Things; and autonomous systems control, which are at the core of the Industrie 4.0 vision. The research will be accompanied by a holistic training programme that provides the 14 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) with a multidisciplinary skillset comprising computer science, psychology, physics and engineering. DiManD will demonstrate a compressed product life cycle through the delivery of robust and compliant manufacturing systems that can be rapidly configured and optimised, thus reducing production ramp-up times and programme switchovers. This will lead to increased opportunities for new, small and independent production stakeholders, particularly those involved in the realisation of product, process and assembly system manufacturing.
