Initiative for excellence in production research - XPRES

More information can be found at   the XPRES web site

XPRES will establish an internationally competitive platform for production research to meet future challenges of world leading Swedish industry. By complementing each others scientific competences and roles, this unique research and education consortium covers the fields of production processes, production systems and digital engineering. The industrial partners represent world leading Swedish manufacturing industries including heavy vehicle, machine, component manufacturing and aircraft.

Vision

The vision of XPRES is to be an excellent and internationally recognized research and education environment within advanced production, being among the top five in Europe. This environment creates lasting value for Swedish world-leading manufacturing industry and society.

Mission

The mission of the Initiative for excellence in production research is to conduct production research that:

• is of the highest international quality,
• contributes towards fulfilling major needs and solving important problems in society,
• contributes to areas with connection to the Swedish industrial sector.

Objectives

This joint initiative to develop an excellent research and education environment within advanced production has four specific objectives:

• Create a base for excellence in production research enabling radical steps forward and renewal within production research as well as strengthening strong research areas at KTH, MDH and Swerea.
• Enable enhanced knowledge co-production between academia, research institutes and industry through the application of new, enhanced processes and infrastructures.
• Provide an efficient education and research environment within the manufacturing engineering area. Greater focus and concentration of research activities between the partners will lead to the ability to provide width and depth in research education, a long-term coordination of education curricula, and an increased exchange between the partners within basic education.
• Build a base for increased internationalization of the research activities within manufacturing engineering by sharing links, results, and synergies within selected areas such that the international community may be strengthened with a structured international exchange of students and researchers.

Strategy

In order to fulfil the vision of being ‘an excellent research and education environment within advanced production, thus creating lasting value for Swedish world-leading manufacturing industry and society’ and fulfilling the objectives, the XPRES initiative relies on a set of four actions:

• Forming a strong and complementary consortium.
• Creating cross-organizational and cross-disciplinary focus areas.
• Developing an enabling organizational structure.
• Building a structure for international collaboration.

Research

XPRES relies on a set of concurrent high-quality research activities from the partners as well as strong industrial collaboration structures. Focus and concentration of research activities between the partners will provide the ability to implement width and depth in a common XPRES graduate school, as well as a long-term coordination of education curricula and increased exchange between the partners within undergraduate education. Additionally, XPRES sets a base for increased internationalization of the research activities within manufacturing engineering by way of a shared international community. This will enhance existing links and lead to a structured international exchange of students and researchers. XPRES also finds a new framework for the interaction between the academia, represented by KTH, MDH and Swerea and the industrial partners. Mobility between the parties has a central role.

Two integrated facilities are created within XPRES to provide scenes for intense cooperation between the partners:

• The ‘XPRES real lab’ provides new flexible/adaptive manufacturing lab facilities. This lab will allow manufacturing equipment to be installed for projects with a limited duration.
• The ‘XPRES virtual lab’ provides new digital factory and augmented reality facilities. This lab will allow concepts to be tested virtually and provides an information exchange platform. Research results will be documented and easily accessible in web guides and authoring tools in production engineering.

The company involvement within XPRES will be intensive. The companies and research institutes are represented in the XPRES management as well as in the three research focus areas.

Focus areas

In order to develop leading-edge production research for the future, three specific cross organizational and cross-disciplinary focus areas have been identified:

Manufacturing for emergent materials and technologies

This area relates to future products that will have to comply with increased requirements on performance and durability in combination with new, and augmented environmental demands. XPRES believes this will entail an increased utilization of high performance materials, where reduced structural weights for example will offer higher potential by way of reduced operational costs and environmental impacts. However, a successful exploitation of these materials is strongly reliant on robust and rational production methods and processes that need not only to be automated and adaptive, but also dynamically linked to the design phases and thus be holistic.

Life cycle approaches on product realization

This is an area that relates to the challenge of reducing the use of non-renewable materials and energy in a world of rapidly increasing economic activity. Research efforts will aim at developing/verifying a productivity analysis scheme that considers the total life cycle of the product and production system, in order to support a more environmentally sustainable product realization process. Environmental concerns need to be integrated into the product realization process, thus minimizing direct and indirect resource utilization and all types of waste and emission. This involves guidelines for the development of ‘green manufacturing systems’. Life cycle approaches require a holistic and collaborative perspective. Thus efforts will aim at developing a manufacturing information backbone, with information and communication technologies for the representation, visualization and interoperability of digital tools and models.

Adaptive and responsive production

The area relates to systems that automatically and continuously adapt production resources and processes in an optimal way, with respect to both business and production objectives as well as market and technical conditions. Adaptive production will focus on the evolvable production systems (EPS) paradigm and the required technologies for its implementation. It does focus on a solution which, being based on several re-configurable, process oriented, low granularity intelligent modules, allows for a continuous evolution of the production system. It also goes a step further by proposing a totally new way of considering the products and production systems: the design cycle of the products will be influenced by which production modules are available.