Objective
Colour Sheet Fed Printing is a way of life for thousands of printers within the European Community. When the industry suppliers, training sectors and peripheral industries (pre-press, advertising, paper and inks, etc.) are taken into account, the industrial sector accounts for a minimum of 8,000 companies and at least 400,000 jobs. This industry is under great pressure to produce a higher percentage of good-quality work (reduce waste), diminish make-ready (setting up new print jobs), and increase overall productivity (reduce down-time).
At the same time, the technology is rapidly evolving and the need is increasingly for employees who "understand printing" and not just for those who know how to run the machines. This implies giving printers a better understanding of the functional dependencies of the printing process. In particular it means putting an emphasis on quality control and problem detection and correction: showing the trainees what can go wrong and how to work back from problems on the process output (the printed sheet) to the potential problems on the press.
The SHOTS project proposes to build a dynamic training simulator that would do for sheet fed printing machines what a flight simulator does for aircraft.
The simulator that was built models the offset process as it applied to sheetfed printing. This is the largest segment of the printing industry with over 80 000 companies involved in this sector in Europe alone. This industry represents well over 1 000 000 jobs in the European Union.
While the simulator represents the short-term results, the real long-term benefit from this project is the underlying model of the process. It can be applied to process control for the offset sector as well as serving as a base for similar models for other sectors of the printing industry. As the industry evolves, the underlying model can be used to keep the simulators updated so that existing personnel can adapt to the new technology and new personnel can learn how to operate the process. The underlying model is a generic one - serving the interests of the group of SMEs in the project, and not reflecting any one supplier's technology,
It would let the trainee "run" the press, and would show him/her what the output print copy would look like for any given machine state. Rather than memorise a predefined set of output print copies, the simulator will calculate what the copy should look like any time the trainee wants to "pull" a copy. The simulator would be accompanied by an "Exercise Generator" that would let the trainers set up sequences of problems that the trainee must recognise, analyse and correct.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcolors
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Topic(s)
Data not availableCall for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
91893 Orsay
France