Section: Other Grants and Activities

European projects

Network of Excellence I*PROMS

Participants : Lyes Benyoucef, Sophie Hennequin, Nidhal Rezg, Alexandre Sava.

The Network of Excellence for Innovative Production Machines and Systems (I*PROMS: see http://www.iproms.org/ : Innovative PROduction Machines and Systems; October 2004 - September 2009) is funded under the EU Sixth Framework Program for a duration of five years. I*PROMS aims to address many of the challenges facing the manufacturing sector in the 21st century. It focuses research on intelligent and adaptive production machines and systems to realize its vision of the knowledge-based 'Autonomous Factory' for delivering increased competitiveness for manufacturing in 2020. Ultimately, this will help I*PROMS establish itself as the European Union's authoritative research body for the area of Production Machines and Systems.

At present, I*PROMS comprises 30 member institutions representing 14 European countries and the coordinator is Cardiff University (United Kingdoms)

To realize the 'Autonomous Factory' vision of I*PROMS, the Network will vigorously prosecute research in four integrated areas spanning the whole field of production equipment and technologies. These integrated areas, referred to as clusters, are 'core competency areas' and I*PROMS will invest the necessary finances and resources to support them. They comprise:

1. Advanced Production Machines (APM) Cluster: will research into the innovative and readily reconfigurable machines and systems and efficient manufacturing processes needed to deliver high-quality products competitively in the future.

2. Production Automation and Control (PAC) Cluster: will examine control issues associated with the 'Autonomous Factory' and the new ICT-based paradigms and algorithms needed to realize autonomy robustly and cost-effectively.

3. Innovative Design Technology (IDT) Cluster: will focus on activities that are traditionally upstream with respect to manufacturing and develop novel collaborative tools and techniques to bring design closer to manufacturing, thus producing gains in competitiveness through maximizing concurrency.

4. Production Organization and Management (POM) Cluster: will develop the innovative methodologies necessary to achieve manufacturing competitiveness. It will address the effective integration of human and technical resources. POM will create new sustainable management strategies for cost-effective and rapid reconfiguration of the Factory.

Members of COSTEAM contribute to clusters PAC and POM.