INESC TEC develops apps to support Manufacturing Systems Engineering

INESC TEC’s Centre for Enterprise Systems Engineering  (CESE) is working on the European project APPS4aME – Engineering Apps for advanced Manufacturing Engineering, where the purpose is to develop a set of apps to support Manufacturing Systems Engineering in order to increase productivity and reliability in small series production environments.

The need to develop these apps came from the change in paradigm that occurred in the European manufacturing industry, which went from mass production to a customised or small series production, where the preferences of consumers are taken into consideration. This entails a higher complexity in manufacturing systems design and operation.

To deal with this added complexity, it is necessary to have new methods and tools based on knowledge that will make it possible to model, optimise and monitor manufacturing systems, supporting the engineering and reengineering stages of manufacturing systems.

In this project, CESE will be responsible for conducting R&D activities mainly in terms of modelling and managing business processes based on knowledge, performance management, interoperability and advanced collaborative environments. The person representing INESC TEC in this project is Américo Azevedo, a researcher at CESE, who will be supported by Álvaro Caldas (also from CESE) in the initial stage of the project.

The project is coordinated by the German Institute Fraunhofer-IPA, and other than INESC TEC the consortium includes the Portuguese partners Autoeuropa and ATEC – Academia de Formação, and the remaining partners CarmOlimp (Romania), Bazigos and LMS (both from Greece), Siemens, SAP and CADS (all from Germany), Technology Transfer System – TTS and ITIA-CNR (Italy). The APPS4aME has a duration of 36 months.

Project Website: APPS4aME