Delcam to participate in €5.2m “factories of the future” project
Delcam will be one of the participants in a new €5.2m project to help develop the factories of the future. The COPERNICO (Cooperation Environment for Rapid Design, Prototyping and New Integration Concepts) project is being led by the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre with Boeing, while the other partners are University of Nottingham, UK; University of Brescia, Italy; Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary; Fraunhofer IPA, Germany; Rolls-Royce, UK; Electrolux, Italy; Footprint Tools, UK; Virtalis, UK; Temco, Italy; Teks, France; Cesi, Italy; Prorec, Germany; and Gamax, Hungary. It is part-funded by the European Commission through the Seventh Framework Programme.
The project is developing techniques to help businesses maximise the efficiency of their factories, and to integrate rapidly new products and processes. Delegates from all the partners met at the AMRC in early June to launch the four-year project.
"A common problem for manufacturing companies is how to get through the initial production stage,” explained Professor Keith Ridgway, research director at the AMRC. "How do companies move through that stage as quickly as possible and what modelling tools can they use to aid the decisions? COPERNICO aims to reduce the time and cost to introduce new products and processes, and reduce the time to redesign and reconfigure factory systems.”
The research will be driven by real-life case studies provided by the industrial partners. For example, Rolls-Royce has identified three case studies, including the design and layout of its new civil nuclear manufacturing facility (which will be built close to the AMRC in South Yorkshire). Similarly, Italian home appliances group Electrolux will work with COPERNICO researchers to improve the efficiency of its own manufacturing facilities and those of its supply chains.
Helping smaller businesses to become more competitive is an important part of COPERNICO. Case studies are also being provided by Sheffield-based Footprint Tools and Italian automotive supplier Temco, which both want to grow by developing new high-value manufacturing services within Europe.
COPERNICO will deploy and develop a range of technologies, including modelling of human-machine interactions, virtual simulation of factory environments and online software tools to help businesses diagnose areas for improvement.
Delcam is leading a work package in the COPERNICO project that will help to ensure integration and interoperability between CAD, CAM and inspection software, and PLM systems. With the partners involved, Delcam will identify:
• modelling tools for representing the physical system
• tools for management decision making
• tools for information systems (PLM)
From this analysis, any gaps in functionality will be indentified that need to be filled to meet the overall time and cost objectives of the project participants.
Dr Jim Baldwin, technical coordinator for COPERNICO at the AMRC added: "There are tens of thousands of manufacturing SMEs across Europe. The challenge for our project is to integrate the vast amount of information about them and produce new tools which can be used by a wide range of these smaller manufacturing businesses.”
13 July 2010