DimanD – Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovative Training Network (ITN)
The project will provide high-quality multidisciplinary, multi-professional and cross-sectorial research and training to high-achieving early stage researchers in the area of Industry 4.0.
Background
The economic prosperity of Europe will increasingly depend on maintaining and further expanding a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector based on sophisticated technologies, relevant knowledge and skill bases, and manufacturing infrastructure that has the ability to produce a high variety of complex products faster, more reliably and cheaper. In high labour cost economies, manufacturing competitiveness depends on maximising the utilisation of all available resources, empowering human intelligence and creativity, and capturing and capitalising on available information and knowledge for the total product lifecycle from design, through production, use and maintenance to recycling.
Project description
The project will provide high-quality multidisciplinary, multi-professional and cross-sectorial research and training to high-achieving early stage researchers in the area of Industry 4.0. DiManD project comprises a well-balanced consortium that spans six European countries and incorporates academic and industry sectors to promote international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral aspects of ESR skill development. The programme will host 14 Early Stage Researcher (ESR) positions.
Aim and objectives
The project aims at developing 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 Industry 4.0 practitioners.
Regarding the research framework, the aim is supported by the following objectives:
- To provide a comprehensive and appropriate set of training and development activities for ESRs (e.g. network wide modules, courses and events, both technical and non-technical, 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)).
- 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).
- 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).
- 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 (WP5).
- 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).
Regarding the training framework, the aim is supported by the following objectives:
- To enable the ESR community to innovate, develop and translate implant technologies from industrial needs to a commercial product. This integrated training programme placing research excellence at its core with advanced technical skills through hands-on research and structured training courses provided by the consortium network.
- To gain international and intersectoral experience through planned industrial placements and secondments, enhancing career development and employability and promoting their development into leading innovators in the European Digital Industry sector.
Outcomes
The main outcomes of the project can be summarized as follow:
- 14 highly trained future industrial and academic leaders (WP2)
- High-quality international training program with a lasting legacy (WP2)
- Human-centred design methods which will allow creating advanced CPS related product-services in Industry 4.0 scenarios (WP3)
- New architectures and models for digital manufacturing and design, new design and testing approaches as well as new control concepts and algorithms (WP3/4)
- Robotic cell control for automotive applications (WP4)
- Data analytics methods (WP4/5)
- New multi-agent control solutions (WP5)
- Data capture using the industrial internet of things (WP5)
