Description
The Looming Factory Consortium has, as its main purpose, to group, consolidate and guide current research in Industry 4.0 of the main R&D&I Centers in Catalonia towards industrial verification demonstrators and validation of current research results. The Project will define and obtain the offer of the current technologies that will later allow the leap towards full digitalization of Catalan industry. As an additional consequence, it will define the roadmap of future research to be developed and will facilitate the connection of Catalonia’s research and innovation centers with its industry and civil society.
Looming Factory proposes to develop and validate -in pilot plants – digital technologies of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, characterized by the interconnexion of machines and systems and the operational integration of workers in a productive environment, as well as by the exchange of information with logistics and distribution systems.
Looming Factory is built up of 4 pillars:
- Smart Factory: to develop advanced monitorization algorithms.
- Connected Factory: focused on communications systems.
- Robots on Factory: addressed to the issues arisen in the use of the workspace by robots- arms or mobile-robots and how they collaborate with workers.
- Factories of the Future: includes demonstrators of technologies developed in previous pillars. I2CAT is part of this Project pillar.
Estimated impact:
First, these technologies, their development and implementation, can reverse the process of industrial relocation experienced by all developed countries, and especially Catalonia and Western Europe. Manufacturing products closer to the end customer and at lower costs, can make that countries that adopt technology 4.0 faster, become new poles of industrial and social development. In addition, the introduction of advanced digital technologies in any industrial sector will help maintain local talent, allowing a more homogeneous distribution of wealth.
The automated production -with digital basins of the plant located in the cloud- also allows the distribution in space and time of human intervention, increasingly oriented to knowledge and not to standardization and repetition therefore, this evolution must facilitate the work-life balance.
Finally, with the direct connection between the customer / user and the manufacturer / supplier, new business models will be opened, much more dynamic and based on information, which will allow to develop new areas of knowledge, development and business, with activities not necessarily linked to local production.