Artificial Intelligence for sustainable, agile manufacturing (AI, Data and Robotics - Made in Europe Partnerships) (IA) -

Expected Outcome

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Establishing European industry as leader in sustainable manufacturing and process industries through the application of trustworthy AI technologies;
• Improving the environmental sustainability of industrial production;
• Improving the agility of European industry and its resiliency to external and internal influences;
• Integrating state-of-the-art AI technologies with advanced circular manufacturing and re-manufacturing technologies and systems, exploiting their potential across the entire product and service lifecycle;

Scope

This topic focuses on manufacturing and process industries, addressing the entire lifecycle of products and services from design to remanufacturing and including all the aspects primarily relevant for industrial production. The objective is to exploit the potential of AI as a transformation tool to support circular production in the entire manufacturing and process industry, with due consideration for standardisation activities when relevant. AI will be a strategic instrument to improve sustainability, agility and resilience to external and internal influences, taking account of the European Green Deal objectives. AI applications will be capable of optimising their actions based on limited human input, thanks to context awareness and information sensed from the physical environment, and will have the long useful lifetime typical of industrial environments.

Projects have to address the need for AI tool sets with simplified interfaces requiring only easy to acquire skills, and adapted to manufacturing environments without highly skilled personnel. Methods and tools will be provided to make AI solutions usable also for lower volume production and shorter time series, guaranteeing the quality of results even while using reduced resources for the training of AI algorithms. Generative approaches could be considered to help designing products and processes improving the sustainability of industrial solutions. The topic will integrate new or existing technologies to make them practically and economically viable in the industrial world; this should be demonstrated through at least two realistic use cases with demonstrable economic return.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

Research must build on existing standards or contribute to standardisation. Interoperability for data sharing should be addressed.

All projects should build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms.

This topic implements jointly the co-programmed European Partnerships Made in Europe and AI, Data and Robotics.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

Activities are expected to start at TRL 4 and achieve TRL 7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

Socio-economic science and humanitiesCo-programmed European PartnershipsCo-programmed European Partnerships

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