Conference Details - Agenda

The Compressor Technique Business Area has a turnover of 3.5 B Euro and 14000 employees in 2011. It is the largest business unit of the Swedish industrial group Atlas Copco, founded in 1873 and celebrating its 140 years anniversary in 2013.

The Compressor Technique headquarters and its main factory, Atlas Copco Airpower, are located in Belgium since 1956 when Atlas Copco acquired Arpic and moved all compressor related production and R&D to Wilrijk.

Today Airpower employs 2700 people and has a unique stand within Atlas Copco with its integration of R&D, product development, marketing, manufacturing development, sourcing, production and distribution, all in one site.

Mr Frigne elaborates on the factors which have contributed to the growth and strong stand of Atlas Copco Airpower in Flanders. He also highlights some of the challenges the company is facing today and what is needed in order to strengthen and further expand the position of Atlas Copco Airpower in a global economy.

Western Europe is continuously facing changing conditions of the globalization. Competition is and was in the past always high. But boundary conditions have changed. This requires new ways of managing and implementing appropriate solutions. Actions to face these problems are taken by various countries. In this presentation the global challenges will be addressed and current research approaches and solutions will be discussed. In addition and as an example the German Cluster of Excellence on Integrative Production will be introduced. The cluster aims to increase the competitiveness of manufacturing industries. At European level, similar actions are taken to strengthen the competitive position of the European manufacturing industry. The European Factories of Future Research Association (EFFRA) was established by the MANUFUTURE Technology Platform to shape, promote and support the implementation of the ‘Factories of the Future’. In general the presentation will be based on highlighting real cases studies from research and industry.

Thermal-fluid-surface interactions are ubiquitous in multiple industries including Energy, Water, Agriculture, Transportation, Electronics Cooling, Buildings, etc. Over the years, these systems have been designed for increasingly higher efficiency using incremental engineering approaches that utilize system-level design trade-offs. These system-level approaches are, however, bound by the fundamental constraint of the nature of the thermal-fluid-surface interactions, where the largest inefficiencies occur. In this talk, we show how surface/interface morphology and chemistry can be engineered to fundamentally alter these interactions in a wide range of processes including condensation, boiling, drop dynamics, ice and clathrate hydrate mitigation, separation, catalysis, durable materials and nanomanufacturing. Applications of these nanoengineered surfaces for dramatic efficiency enhancements in various energy, water, and transportation systems including oil & gas (flow assurance and energy efficiency), turbines, engines, power and desalination plants, and electronics cooling will be highlighted.

With the advent of low cost – high power computing, today’s factories are replete with information technology. This gives not only the capability to automate the process, but also to provide networked data systems both within and outside the factory and the opportunity to collect “big data”. Such a world was envisioned in the 1980’s as the PC was coming into use along with reliable LAN technology and ubiquitous numerically controlled machinery.

However, the full promise of actually controlling manufacturing processes on a wide spread basis has yet to be achieved. This can be traced to a number of problems, the most difficult being the detailed physics of the transformation involved in a process. Except for a small number of processes, the uncertainty or variability of most processes requires either significant human intervention to assure quality, or some form of continuous process output control. While there has been broad adoption of statistical monitoring and optimization methods, the use of fully feedback-controlled processes has been minimal, despite the well-established value. With increasing precision, quality and productivity demands, there is a need to complete the promise of fully controlled processes.

This presentation will outline the history and status of the process control problem, and point to some existing and emerging methods that can be used to achieve the goal of fully controlled manufacturing processes. It will end with speculation on the impact of same on the manufacturing enterprise.

The Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) project brings together leading MIT faculty from a variety of disciplines to look at the present state and future of U.S. manufacturing. The study's overarching goal is to shed light on how America's great strengths in innovation can be scaled up into new productive capabilities. This talk will present some preliminary findings from PIE and focus on examples of promising manufacturing models based on over 150 company interviews to date.

On June 24th, 2011, President Barak Obama announced the formation of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP). The AMP Steering Committee was led by the CEOs of twelve major corporations and Presidents of six major research universities. The AMP effort brought together thought leaders from industry, universities, and government to chart a course for investing and furthering the development of the emerging technologies that will create high quality manufacturing jobs and enhance U.S. global competitiveness. The AMP recommendations are contained in a report issued on July 17, 2012 entitled 'Capturing Domestic Competitive Advantage in Advanced Manufacturing'. The report provides 16 recommendations “aimed at reinventing manufacturing in a way that ensures U.S. competitiveness, feeds into the nation’s innovation economy, and invigorates the domestic manufacturing base.” This presentation will explain the AMP process and detail the recommendations which are focussed on enabling innovation, securing the talent pipeline, and improving the business climate.

This presentation will provide an overview of the global economy since the Great Recession, including the prospects for the Eurozone, the role of the U.S. dollar, the direction of interest rates, and the prospects for growth in Europe and abroad.

Recent advances in computation, sensing, and hardware enable robotics to perform an increasing percentage of traditionally manual tasks. Yet, often the assembly mechanic cannot be removed entirely from the process. This provides new economic motivation to explore opportunities where assembly mechanics and industrial robots may work in close physical collaboration. In this talk, I present adaptive work-sharing and scheduling algorithms to collaborate with industrial robots on two levels: one-to-one human robot teamwork, and factory-level sequencing and scheduling of human and robotic tasks. I discuss our recent work developing adaptive control methods that incorporate high-level, person-specific planning and execution mechanisms to promote predictable, convergent team behavior. We apply human factors modeling coupled with statistical methods for planning and control to derive quantitative methods for assessing the quality and convergence of learnt teaming models, and to perform risk-sensitive robot control on the production line. I also discuss computationally efficient methods for coordinating human and robotic sequencing and scheduling at the factory-level. Tight integration of human workers and robotic resources involves complex dependencies. Even relatively small increases in process time variability lead to schedule inefficiencies and performance degradation. Our methods allow fast, dynamic computation of robot tasking and scheduling to respond to people working and coordinating in the space physical space, and provide real-time guarantees that schedule deadlines and other operational constraints will be met.

Deputy Prime-Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belgium, Mr. Didier Reynders, will discuss the need for European countries to urgently strengthen their growth and competitiveness, and how current initiatives at the EU level, including the EU 2020 Strategy for Smart, Inclusive and Sustainable Growth, can help achieve this objective.