New Zero Defect Manufacturing Methodology Development Project
Zero Defects Manufacturing or just ZDM is one of the main goals of Advanced Manufacturing. Sectors as critical as the aeronautical, the railway, the automotive and wind energy require increasingly more supervision of each of the parts that are part of the engines or other critical elements that they produce and assemble.
Product quality is a major strategic factor of competitiveness for the European manufacturing industry in the global market. However, production and quality control methods being used by European manufacturing companies have evolved at very slow rate and still rely on systems such as Six-Sigma or World Class Manufacturing dating from the 60s’ and 90s’, respectively. But these systems are no longer designed to cope with the dynamically changing context that companies have to face today. Actually, shorter life cycle of the products, increased complexity in design and manufacturing, higher customization requests, sustainability concerns, increasing demands on traceability or cost reduction can be assumed as current common trends for the entire European manufacturing community.
This new manufacturing paradigm has been addressed by existing Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) approaches. Unfortunately, these approaches remain up to date focused on single production stages and solutions are applied in a static and sequential way. As a result, it is difficult to achieve quick adaptation of the operations to evolving production targets so, at the end, the companies’ resulting competitiveness remains limited.
In this context, the ForZDM project will deliver an innovative ZDM methodology for production and quality control of multi-stage manufacturing systems which will meet the current dynamic production and quality targets through the integration of multi-level system modelling, big data analysis, CPS (Cyber Physical Systems) and real-time data management. The methodology will be implemented and validated in three industrial cases, namely, the manufacturing of jet engine shafts, medical microcatheters and railway axles.
It is expected that this new methodology will significantly contribute to achieve near zero defect level in all European manufacturing sectors, with an emphasis on the production of high-value, high-performance parts. A consortium of over twelve companies are participating in the project including Marposs, GKN Aerospace and the University of Stuttgart. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 723698.
For more information: www.forzdmproject.eu
