“How to make manufacturing sexy for young people?” Marta Portales, moderator of the session “Young generations & Manufacturing: an insurmountable gap?” went straight to the heart of the problem. Technologist Antonio Grasso affirmed that “we must introduce young...

In 2019, Eurofound found out that 39% of European manufacturing companies reported that their production was limited by labour shortages.   How come? The manufacturing sector offers among other things to: 1. Join a...

A study from 2018 predicted that more than 8 million manufacturing jobs worldwide could be unfilled in 2030. Why do industrial positions seem unattractive? Why is a sector, so crucial to our everyday lives, that produces about everything around us, from tables,...

1. We need stricter regulations “We are lacking stricter policies that will push circular economy implementations.” (Edurne) Implementing new processes may be challenging but it’s the only way to go. According to the European Environmental Agency, the industry was...

The World Economic Forum recently underlined the appalling status of the environmental situation in Europe. In 2021, the industry emits an annual total of 880 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and equivalents, making the continent one of the largest emitters of...

If you had to summarise DIMOFAC in one word, what would it be and why?   Responsive. Why does DIMOFAC matter? It is of paramount importance that industrial manufacturing is responsive to changing market requirements as well as disruptions in value...

An innovation is only as good as its bridge to the established technology. The transformation towards Industry 4.0, especially, needs to be guided on both the level of technological details as well as on the high, conceptual level. In this post, Cornelis Bouter,...

That is one of the many misconceptions that we, women and men, could have regarding industrial environments.  During a dedicated session organised by various manufacturing and research-related European initiatives (Integradde, DIMOFAC, PeneloPe, Level-Up,...

Article from Antonio Misuraca, Comau 1. Why is safety important in human-robot cooperation? No more than three decades ago, the common way industries used robotics resources consisted in relegating the robots behind walls, fences and metal doors. In the past,...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, is disrupting the manufacturing industry and its labour market. However, one aspect remains unchanged: women still are a minority in high-qualified manufacturing positions. In the European Union, only 21% of...

Cyber-physical systems play a big part in the advent of Industry 4.0. The digital manufacturing revolution going on is moving the approach from mass-production to mass-customisation. This means the consumers act directly on the definition of the production order...

The transition from summer to autumn was acknowledged with a conversation on a transition of another kind: the digital transformation of the European manufacturing industry. On Tuesday 31 August, five representatives from major H2020 EU Projects in Industry 4.0...

This statistic from a PWC report on the Future of Manufacturing shows that manufacturers cannot afford to lag behind if they want to remain competitive. Following the manufacturing consulting company Aeva, implementing Digital Factory solutions can lead to drastic...

Digital training for the industry is a necessary part of factory life. Workers must learn how to execute and supervise assembly operations and reconfiguration actions. New and inexperienced workers must first learn the sequence of actions for each operation. This...

At the end of May, the European Commission conducted its first review of the DIMOFAC initiative. The goal: to make sure everything is on track regarding the various sub-objectives that were agreed with the European Commission related to helping factories...

https://youtu.be/tV8Y8A4hvHU DIMOFAC is a project that came to life to help factories make their assembly lines more responsive to demand changes. This implies in particular automating and computerising manual industrial processes in order to be able to reconfigure...

Transitioning towards a more responsive and modular factory is challenging. First of all, It requires very reconfigurable machinery on the shop floor resorting to plug-and-produce technology. Secondly, plants need to implement very efficient and reactive quality...

1. What is Plug-and-Produce in Manufacturing? In manufacturing, Plug-and-Produce is defined as "the capability of a production system to automatically identify a new or modified component and to integrate it correctly into the running production process without...

1. What is a Common Information Model In manufacturing, a Common Information Model (CIM) is a model based on industrial standards enabling data understanding between different production lines. 1. The first level of understanding is horizontal: between devices and...

Article from Kunal Suri, Researcher at CEA 1. What are Digital Twins? Digital twins are currently making the headlines in various industrial domains. Infrastructure, natural resources, healthcare, energy, aerospace and defence, just to...

With a consortium of 30 complementary partners, a 4-year duration, and an ambitious goal of making the production lines of European factories more flexible, the DIMOFAC project might be difficult to grasp in just one sentence. But what about one picture? Zoom on...

The project, supported by the European Commission and launched in October 2019, will be taking advantage of emerging manufacturing technologies to create, implement and disseminate modular production methods that will help European factories to reconfigure their assembly lines in order to be more productive and flexible and thus reactive to demand changes.

The DIMOFAC consortium held it its kick-off meeting on the 6 and 7 November 2019 in Grenoble, where CEA, the organisation leading the initiative is based.