MODUL4R research project has entered full orbit

The Kick-off Meeting was held in Brussels on the 8th & 9th of February 2023. The partners were welcomed by Fraunhofer IWU, the project’s coordinator, and had the chance to present their organisations and talk about their contribution to the project.

The dynamics of global markets demand shorter product lifecycles and higher product variety, impacted by an increased volatility in demand. To realise resilient factories and supply chains, it is mandatory to reduce complexity and cost of plug & produce modular manufacturing. The EU-funded MODUL4R project a offers a set of strategies and technologies to advance industrial manufacturing with distributed control and resilient, rapidly responsive, and reconfigurable supply chains.

These advancements will allow low-volume production of new products, as well as capacities to rapidly adapt to unexpected situations and changeable supply chains. The project proposes a holistic framework applicable both to new and existing manufacturing lines that is based on 4 four pillars: • Pillar 1: Resilience against changes in customer and societal demands and disruptions in the supply chain. • Pillar 2: Modular Technologies for flexible manufacturing operations. • Pillar 3: Simulation and interfaces to the Industrial Metaverse. • Pillar 4: Human centred technologies and upskilling. The project’s strategies and innovations with be demonstrated in 3 use case pilots. Covering specialized mould manufacturing for the automotive sector, CPPS for flexible & modular assembly of PCBs, and tools manufacturing for the aerospace. The consortium consists of 19 partners from Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Finland, Austria, Slovenia, and Switzerland, and covers an excellent cluster of research institutions and universities, enterprises, and industry partners.