Conversations with the Project Coordinator

European manufacturing enterprises are facing challenges in a turbulent globalised market dealing with abrupt changes in market demands, an ever-increasing number of product variants and smaller lot sizes, causing continuous pressure on production costs. This results in large-scale fluctuations of demand, increasing product variants with specific configurations, random dispatching of orders, short delivery lead times of products and shortened product life cycles. Traditional approaches, consisting of rigid manufacturing architectures, are unable to deal with these upcoming challenges.

To that extent, PIONEER aims to the development and implementation of an interoperable Materials-Modelling-Manufacturing Ecosystem enabling multidirectional dataflow along the material value chain by linking product design and distributed modelling data with information collected from material characterisation, manufacturing processes and product quality criteria.

In PIONEER, we will combine a design-by-simulation approach with manufacturing and quality data for optimising product development strategies in high-mix/low-volume production schemes.

For the time being, the developments till TRL7 will be put to the test in the fabrication of steel construction elements by WAAM.

From the project coordinator’s side, the main goal is to contribute to a new paradigm in the manufacturing sector, providing solutions for a more flexible, able to react swiftly to changes and efficient production. From an internal perspective, AIMEN aims to provide continuity to one of the most successful research lines of its R&D portfolio, which have been or are still being developed in previous H2020 and ongoing Horizon Europe projects, respectively. This research line aims at the implementation of different strategies to link product and process life cycles along the whole value chain and ensure the interoperability among data from Engineering and Production.

Daniel Gesto

Senior Project Manager

AIMEN