Research database

Manufacturing industries are facing radical changes under the technological acceleration of Industry 4.0, with new key technologies enabling companies to extract valuable knowledge from field data. In this new context, current Manufacturing Execution Systems (MESs) need to be extended toward advanced Production Planning and Control (PPC), to allow for the efficient online management of shop floors. The automotive sector is being reformed by the growing market of Electric Vehicle (EV), and industries must be able to adapt to the changes in technologies and processes while operating in a highly variable environment. Indeed, EV manufacturing systems are characterized by high levels of automation, customized products, and volume uncertainty. Production systems are complex and characterized by non-linear product routings and high randomness. Also, the adoption of new and not consolidated manufacturing technologies causes such processes to have higher defective rates than in the classical automotive industry. The Motown project deals with real-time PPC for the next generation MESs in manufacturing industries. Particular attention is given to the EV sector and to the production of the electric motor. The main project contribution is a context-aware short term decision-making framework for high quality manufacturing, to create value along the data-chain from sensors to actuators. To enable this short-term decision support system, Motown proposes to build and constantly update digital models from shop-floor data to allow a continuous improvement of the decision-support models. The project also develops, for demonstration purpose, an Internet of Things architecture to support the real-time alignment of digital representations with the shop floor and ensure the effectiveness of the data-driven approach. A set of real cases from the EV industry will be studied to drive the research activities and verify the obtained results. In addition, a physical and miniaturized manufacturing system will be used to test the developed architecture, tools, and models, in a laboratory environment. Expected results are in terms of new models, methods, and algorithms implemented in a real-time Internet-of-Things-compatible architecture. These results can bring value to not only EV motor production systems, but also to the broader European manufacturing industry. The impact of the project is relevant and wide in terms of new research patterns, increase in companies’ competitiveness, and digitization of shop floors. Last but not least, Motown will have an environmental impact by making EV production more economically sustainable because of the reduction of defective parts, and as a consequence, it will support the diffusion of electric mobility.