XPRESS – Flexible Production Experts for Reconfigurable Assembly Technology
The objective of the project is to develop a new knowledge based manufacturing technology by providing simulation and self-learning methods for continuous improvement of the production process, data replication and data consistence as well as knowledge sharing in the production.
This will allow manufacturers to decrease their ramp-up cycle time when changing products in a shop-floor line and increase their overall efficiency and competitiveness.
This will enable a factory-wide quality control and monitoring to integrate mixed, manual and automated workplaces. At the core of the system we have an specialized autonomous objects (“Manufactrons”), capable of performing simple operations in the shop-floor, orchestrating with more complex production Manufactrons to fulfill the required tasks, and managed by top-level production Manufactrons capable of controlling entire fabs.
The project started in January 2007 and will end in December 2010. Critical Manufacturing has the responsibility to implement some of the production Manufactrons, integrate the whole system into a final working framework and demonstrate the results in prototype applications.
