Università degli Studi di Padova, Sapienza Università di Roma, Camozzi Group S.p.A.
Agile manufacturing is a relatively new term adopted to describe a production approach able to respond quickly to unforeseen customer demands, market volatilities, or other factors of high manufacturing impact such as changing lot sizes, variants, process technologies. The project concerns the design of monitoring, control and supervision techniques for the optimal management of time and resources in the digital factory. Particular emphasis will be given to the use of (mobile-based) collaborative robots and to the flexible use of agents (machineries, robots, operators, etc.). Among the various possible applications of collaborative robotics, the assembly of mechanical parts is of particular importance.
The project will be organized along three main lines of research:
The data-driven nature of all the three aspects in the design of the digital factory exposes the system to security, privacy, and potentially safety concerns. Evaluation and design of a threat and adversary model, alongside data protection and cybersecurity measures, with special focus on the cyber-physical elements of the system, will be developed during the project.
The final aim of this project is to build data-driven tools, possibly based on cloud-based artificial intelligence, for control, resource allocation, and scheduling in order to make a production line agile, flexible, easily reconfigurable, and secure.
Specifically, the following results are foreseen in the 36 months’ time-frame of the project: