Focus on Ecological and Efficient Manufacturing

Intensive efforts in the automotive industry are required to yield higher levels of energy efficiency across the entire manufacturing process. In the development of the next generation processes, ICT technologies will play a more dominant role, supporting the optimisation of the whole supply chain while increasing the flexibility of processes. Sustainable and flexible manufacturing will be fundamental to ensuring the competitiveness of the European automobile industry by setting new environmental standards and enabling products with competitive prices to be offered to a global market.

Innovative green painting processes

In order to lower the energy consumption during the manufacturing of vehicles, new surface treatments and paints, together with their respective processes, need to be developed. Furthermore research is required to develop innovative “one-shot” technologies for efficient production of exterior parts with high surface qualities.

Green manufacturing of vehicles and sub-systems

Significant research is required in order to analyse in depth the full potential for exploitation of raw materials taking into account the entire lifecycle of the vehicle and its constituent components.

The focus of activities should be on decreasing the energy consumption across the entire supply chain and on reducing the total environmental impact. From this standpoint, all the critical processes concerning the exploitation, production and transformation of materials need to be reviewed.

The modelling of transformation processes concerns many aspects of relevance including

• material extraction,
• foundry or processing,
• forming, treating,
• finishing,
• assembly and disassembly,
• scrapping,
• recycling and
• heat generation, neutralisation, graving and
• logistics.

Affordable manufacturing of green vehicles

Regarding the next generation of vehicles specifically designed to provide significantly reduced environmental impact, also the effectiveness of the manufacturing processes needs to be verified regarding costs, time and quality. Research is required which focuses on the standardisation of components and the modularisation of sub-systems, exploiting the potential offered by the new vehicles which may be radically different also in terms of construction from conventional vehicles and enable further improvement of the respective assembly processes. Specific attention is required for electric vehicles, and the new issues which may arise regarding their constituent components and sub-systems including batteries.

In order to reduce costs to a minimum, smart and flexible manufacturing processes need to be identified and developed. Required are manufacturing systems which guarantee performance and robustness despite the demand for increasing product variants and highly variable production volumes. In the future, new factory-oriented frameworks are needed for automation and robotics in order to create open, modular and re-configurable control platforms including a range of different machines and equipment.

Digital manufacturing for integrated product and process development

This research area focuses on advanced sensor applications and software for volumetric protection on machinery in order to increase the safety of manufacturing. In particular this includes vision systems, the interaction of operations with the workers, collaborative robots and machinery intelligence for the operator’s protection. Via easy-to-use simulation tools including novel software-features, the factories of the future including buildings, resources and virtual products need to be modelled and represented virtually while taking into account the optimisation of the lifecycle already during the vehicle development phase. In detail this also includes the standard automatic generation of machinery programs and their virtual validation considering the interaction with the real machine control.

Research on virtual engineering covers the broad area of tools and environments in order to set up multi-domain, multidimensional manufacturing factories and processes. 

Virtual engineering for product and process performance management over the whole lifecycle

This research area focuses on methods and tools for the simulation of new and complex performances of products and processes including new and complex materials, complex and multi-domain behaviour as well as physical and cognitive human interaction. Associated with these simulation capabilities, research is needed to develop new approaches and methods for multi-domain optimisation, with respect to the product and process and including the commercial and environmental impact throughout the complete lifecycle.

Graphic: Virtual reality demonstration.

This approach encompasses a series of challenging research topics of high relevance and common interest to the vehicle manufacturers and the supply chain:

• New open, flexible architectures to integrate product and process representation, data and process management, design and evaluation, refinement tools, factory and service feedback.
• Holistic, evolutionary product representations based on semantics, ontology and embedded rules,
• Co-located and remote collaboration technologies and systems, focused on low cost, open solutions preserving security and IPR management,
• Cost-effective, unobtrusive, high immersion rate of virtual reality and augmented reality systems for virtual product engineering and user-in-the-loop testing.
• Real time architectures and middleware are able to seamlessly link product representations and simulation and virtual reality environments.

Graphic: Simulation of resistant spot welding