Programme

The program revolves around five themes:

1. Digitalisation for Green Transformation

Europe is facing two grand challenges today, the green transition and the digital transition. These might seem like two distinct issues, but really, they are twin challenges: neither can succeed without the other.  In an ideal world the green and digital transitions reinforce each other. However, there are a multitude of technical and market-based barriers. In this twin transition, artificial intelligence and digitalisation support the achievement of sustainable development goals in many ways, by promoting energy efficiency, productive efficiency and productivity, operational sustainability, recyclability, traceability of materials, and so on. This session will discuss on the visions and technologies that will allow us to benefit from the twin transition.

Keywords: Digitalisation, digital twins, Platform economy, High performance computing (HPC), business models, energy efficiency

2. Circular Economy as a Driver for Servitisation

Circularity is an essential part of a wider transformation of industry towards climate-neutrality and sustainability. It can deliver substantial resource savings throughout value chains and production processes, generate additional value and unlock economic opportunities. Within the circular economy, the new business and operations models have emerged. These models complement the traditional approach by advancing servitisation and new use models, such as sharing, renting and recycling instead of owning. This session will offer you a broad overview of the business models and technologies in the era of Circular Economy.

Keywords: CE, green production, raw materials, logistics, sustainable investments, regulations

3. Manufacturing as a Service – Towards Resilient Supply Chains

​Manufacturing-as-a-Service allows companies to manufacture their products without investing in massive infrastructure. The shift to MaaS has become possible as a result of technological advances such as connectivity, standards and protocols, sensor technologies and data spaces to name few. This greater flexibility places new requirements on the supply chains. The growing importance and the vulnerability of global supply chains has fundamentally changed the way the global economy and goods manufacturing are organised. The pandemic and the war disrupted the global supply system. This session will focus on the new business models following the MaaS and their impact to the supply chain resiliency.

Keywords: Manufacturing as a service, resiliency, agility, transparency, supply chains, trust

4. Future Robotics, Flexible Automation and Autonomous Systems

A paradigm shift in the field of robotics is happening now. In the past robots were used for repetitive and specific precision-oriented jobs. Today we can already see the increase of computational intelligence and autonomy as robots move from mechanised tools to useful assistants supporting our everyday life. These robots complementing humans’ capabilities could provide a breakthrough in factories, logistics, healthcare, agrifood sector and automatization of different industries in the near future under the in the industry 4.0 vision. This track will dive into the latest trends in advanced robotics and autonomous systems technologies and visions for future investments.

Keywords: Robotics, manufacturing capabilities, Lot-size-one production, lack of resources, efficiency

5. Safety and Cyber Security in Resilient Societies

Increasing automation and intelligence in manufacturing systems and value chains increases complexity and vulnerability. The manufacturing industry has experiences a fast increase in cyber-related unintended incidents as well as highly targeted attacks towards e.g. the control systems used to manage industrial operations. This session will discuss a variety of challenges ranging from trustworthiness of the physical and IT systems inside the factories and company networks, to the targeted attacks originating from the outside world as well as to the vulnerability of the systems due to increased complexity and automation.

Keywords: cyber-security, functional safety, interconnectedness, ICT-house, regulations, complexity