Innovative reuse of modular knowledge based devices and technologies for old, renewed and new factories

The vision of ReBORN was to demonstrate strategies and technologies that support a new paradigm for re-use of production equipment in old, renewed and new factories

This new paradigm allows maximizing the efficiency of this re-use and making the factory design process much easier and straight forward, shortening ramp-up times and increasing production efficiency and flexibility, giving new life to decommissioned production systems and equipment, making it possible their “reborn” in new production lines.

ReBORN demonstrated the technologies for intelligent repair, upgrade and re-use of equipment, the (re-)design of factory layouts and flexible & adaptable production on shop-floor within several industrial demonstration scenarios.

The proposed approach builds on self-aware and knowledge-based equipment that need functionality to collect and manage information regarding their capabilities and their evolution over time, maintenance, upgrade or refurbishment operations over its lifetime; and information of use and wear. To do so, versatile and modular, task-driven plug & produce devices, with built-in capabilities for self-assessment and optimal re-use will be implemented, along with strategies for their re-use and models for factory layout design and adaptive configuration.

Critical Manufacturing was able to leverage its experience in Production Control Applications, System Optimization, Manufacturing Execution Systems and Factory Visualization systems and led a work-package with the objective of creating a software prototype for factory layout design enriched with all components developed in other work-packages.