Innovative knowledge-based Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) is a key enabler to minimise cost, improve adaptability, responsiveness, robustness, and sustainability of manufacturing processes. This CAPP-4-SMEs project, planned for 36 month duration and 480 person-months, is aimed at enhancing the competitiveness of European companies, particularly SMEs, in sustainable manufacturing environment by:

(1) collaborative and adaptive process planning against changes;
(2) knowledge-based and integrated process simulation towards first-time-right processes;
(3) event-driven function blocks for on-board adaptive process control;
(4) machine availability monitoring for real-time job routing;
(5) a Cloud-based services platform for cost-effective and easy access over the Internet.

The CAPP-4-SMEs Consortium is comprised of 11 partners (4 universities, 1 multi-national manufacturing company and 6 SMEs) from 5 European countries (Sweden, UK, Greece, Germany and Spain). The complementary expertise of the academic and industrial European partners in the project enables knowledge sharing, dissemination and exploitation of scientific findings, industrial applications and technical know-hows across the EU. Technical innovations will be achieved through collaborative RTD activities oriented towards industrial applications for factories of the future.

Industry-relevant demonstration will be developed in the project as an important element for results validation using real-world cases from SMEs. Targeting to showcase 40% reduction in resource consumption, 30% improvement in process robustness and accuracy, and 30% increase in productivity by reduced cycle times under more reliable and efficient manufacturing conditions, the demonstration activities based on the RTD outcomes of the project will be geared to exploit future commercialisation opportunities throughout the extensive industrial networks of the Consortium, and to generate greater impacts in broader areas of the EU.