Industry of the future
Application area
Tomorrow’s factory will be competitive, efficient, safe and connected to meet economic, technological, organizational, environmental and societal challenges. It must face several simultaneous transitions: energy, environmental, digital, organizational and societal. Each of these transitions calls for new technologies or new ways of organisation.
Factory of the future
The extended factory will be increasingly connected, which requires implementating tools that provide real-time information on industrial processes (design, manufacturing, logistics and maintenance) and enable product lifecycle management (PLM). This connected industry also allows for the evolution of collaboration modes both internally and with customers and subcontractors.
The factory will integrate new technologies (presence of autonomous mobile robots, cobotics, additive manufacturing tools, artificial intelligence and supervision, augmented reality) to make it more flexible, more agile, responding more quickly to market needs and increasing product diversity. It will have to be more competitive thanks to predictive maintenance, more complete supervision systems or even thanks to the optimization of flow management. The factory’s flexibility will also be based on the digitization of the production tool. This digitization of production processes and the implementation of a digital twin of the industrial system should enable the design and monitoring of the latter to be optimized.
The modernization of production tools will generate a large amount of data (big data), which will require the implementation of tools to process this data efficiently, rapidly and judiciously in order to extract the most possible relevant information, to implement preventive actions and to support continuous process improvement.
To cope with the evolution of the factory of the future, new businesses will emerge. Humans will therefore need to adapt to this evolution and will need to acquire new skills. The development of new training systems and specific learning environments to put operators/technicians in situations and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow will be necessary.
LINEACT CESI
It is in this context that the laboratory LINEACT CESI develops through its two teams “Learning and Innovating” and “Engineering and Digital Tools” and in connection with the CESI training courses, a research activity at the service of companies and the territory to accompany them in their digital transition and in the preparation of their digitalization. The laboratory focuses more particularly on issues related to the extended and digital factory, the uses of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), and decision support tools for the optimization of production tools and maintenance operations. It also helps companies to increase the skills of their employees facing the massive arrival of these new digital tools, as well as to optimize their innovation processes.