The “Smart Factory Cluster” Roadmap: what kind of new scenarios

or the smart factory, custom manufacturing capability is a salient feature. A must. Indeed, this is the goal of the first line of intervention of the new Roadmap for Research and Innovation 2023 of the National Technology Cluster Intelligent Factory (CFI) to support the evolution of Italian manufacturing.
The updated lines of the CFI Roadmap, presented in Bologna in March 2023, are seven: customized manufacturing; industrial sustainability; people empowerment; high efficiency and zero-deficit; innovative manufacturing processes; evolutionary and resilient manufacturing; digital platforms, modeling, AI, security.

According to the Intelligent Factory Cluster, it is therefore first and foremost essential to drive the evolution of manufacturing toward the study and development of industrial systems and models for the efficient production of customized products that are able to reconfigure themselves in reduced time. Indeed, the smart factory will be increasingly distinguished by its ability to meet specific requirements gathered from customers, with a high degree of integration that will make customers themselves the main architects of solutions.

The smart factory not only needs advanced tools for configuring and designing customized solutions. According to the Smart Factory Cluster, it also needs technologies, processes and tools for reuse, re-manufacturing and recycling of products, components and materials. Then new technologies, methods and tools are needed to optimize the work environment, human-machine interactions and people’s cognitive load. They serve production control and monitoring systems and cyber-physical systems. They serve technologies for additive, subtractive, constant mass, adaptive, evolutionary manufacturing. They serve Digital Twin for performance prediction and highly flexible operational management. They serve Smart Inspection and Machine Learning tools.

The development of innovative digital architectures (platforms, modeling, AI and Big Data solutions, cybersecurity) enable in the smart factory the management and transformation of raw production data into strategic information for decision making. They are also relevant to the definition of dynamic supply chain models