• WHAT IS THE PROBLEM/ISSUE BEING ADDRESSED BY THE DIGIMAN4.0 PROJECT?
A necessary condition for the European productive sector to be at the global forefront of technology, ensuring job creation and sustainable growth, is to have access to innovative, entrepreneurial, highly skilled research cross-disciplinary engineers in the fields of production engineering and digital manufacturing technologies. To date, Industry 4.0 is a trending topic across industries, professions and hierarchical levels inside each company. It is a complex topic, the result of many interrelated elements: technical expertise is required in several different fields. These types of cross-disciplinary profiles are extremely rare, and often not even available. Companies, and in particular SMEs, struggle to embrace the fourth industrial revolution and their uptake of manufacturing digitalization remains a challenge.
• WHY IS THE DIGIMAN4.0 PROJECTIMPORTANT FOR SOCIETY?
Industry 4.0 overall identifies a strategy aimed at enabling industry to a transition towards future ways of production. Industry 4.0 gravitates around one core rationale: recent progress in a variety of digital technologies has created unprecedented possibilities that result in huge improvements in operational effectiveness for manufacturing industries. The magnitude of this paradigm shift justified referring to Industry 4.0 as being the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. There is a widespread consensus among the different stakeholders in the industry, at research institutions and in academia, that Industry 4.0 consists of essentially 9 clusters of key-enabling digital technologies: Big Data and Analytics; Autonomous Robots; Simulation; Horizontal and Vertical System Integration; Industrial Internet of Things; Cybersecurity; Cloud; Additive Manufacturing; Augmented Reality. Industry 4.0 enables several synergies among different elements of current production and the new digital technologies. Those synergies can be translated into initiatives and levers with potential to result in considerable improvements in manufacturing processes.
Manufacturing is deeply embedded in the economy and the society, particularly in Europe. However, even though the European manufacturing industry is among the worldwide technology leaders, the increasing pressure of market demands and of global competition imply the need of expansion of Europe’s manufacturing technologies and capabilities. The key-enabling technologies that will allow to achieve high quality products and significantly reduce the time to market and costs in order to succeed in this global market place are those digital technologies that companies need to embrace and integrate in their organization in order to execute the necessary transformation from their present state into the Industry 4.0 paradigm.
• WHAT ARE THE OVERALL OBJECTIVES OF THE DIGIMAN4.0 PROJECT?
In reply to these needs, the DIGIMAN4.0 ITN has provided world excellent research training to 15 ESRs in the field of digital manufacturing technologies for Industry 4.0. The DIGIMAN4.0 project objectives are:
(1) To develop, realize and demonstrate innovative technological solutions for high quality, high throughput and high precision production (Zero-Defect) for the manufacturing industry.
(2) To deliver cutting edge multi-disciplinary training in Precision Manufacturing Technologies, Digital Manufacturing Technologies, Integrated Production Metrology, Lean Manufacturing, Production Management.
(3) To validate the developed digital manufacturing technologies by integration into process chains for the manufacturing of advanced components in several sectors (medical and health-care, machine tool, hearing aid and micro acoustics, electronics, automotive, aerospace) in an industrial production environment.
