Digitisation of Factory In A Box Solutions

Important results from the project

The project has investigated the conditions for using miniaturized, mobile, fully automated and autonomous manufacturing units, so-called Factory-in-a-box solutions, to produce components exactly where and when needed and in the variants and volumes required. By digitizing data from the entire value chain from raw material to the actual use of the components, the system itself must be able to predict its quality output and self-correct so that production is kept within the quality tolerances at all times.

Expected long term effects

The preliminary study has shown that by introducing cognitive computer science tools, the quality of the studied reference flow can be correlated to the included promotional conditions. These data also provide a basis for learning with artificial intelligence the system to self-correct for deviations before the quality goes out of tolerance. A broad consortium of commercial companies and academic excellence have therefore been formed with the intention of developing a demonstrator and exploiting the autonomous FBX solution commercially.

Approach and implementation

State-of-the-art FBX solutions have been studied at MTC in England. By also sharing their experiences from many man-years of development, the need for a higher degree of digitization precisely for quality prediction and self-correction has been identified and also shown opportunities to achieve this. A process FMEA and study of the entire value chain from raw material for the use of a reference component has likely correlated quality and process conditions, but also highlighted a number of difficulties, including the right to the data collected from the entire value chain.