It is the high ambition of the project to create “FACTorieS for WORKERS” (FACTS4WORKERS), therefore a serious effort will be put into integrating already available IT enablers into a seamless & flexible Smart Factory infrastructure based on worker-centric and data-driven technology building blocks. As FACTS4WORKERS is underpinned by a clear human-centric approach: usability, user experience and technology acceptance are of the utmost project interest. FACTS4WORKERS will develop and demonstrate workplace solutions that support the inclusion of increasing elements of knowledge work on the factory floor. These solutions will empower workers on the shop floor with smart factory ICT infrastructure. Advancement will be gained through integrating several building blocks from a flexible smart factory infrastructure, focusing on workers’ needs, expectations and requirements, and being supported by organisational measures and change management. In line with our assumptions on impacts on productivity we therefore estimate that that we can increase job satisfaction for 800,000 European workers by the year 2025. These solutions will be developed according to the following four industrial challenges which are generalise-able to manufacturing in general: personalised augmented operator (IC1), worked-centric rich-media knowledge sharing/management (IC2), self-learning manufacturing workplaces (IC3) and in-situ mobile learning in the production (IC4). Moreover, FACT4WORKER‘s objectives in terms of measureable indicators are: • To increase problem-solving and innovation skills of workers; • To increase cognitive job satisfaction of workers; • To increase average worker productivity by 10%; • To achieve TRL 5-7 on a number of worker-centric solutions through which workers become the smart element in smart factories The smart factory demonstrator will be run within the automotive supply chain. The consortium is composed by 15 partners from 7 different EU member states.

The steel industry represents an important economic pillar of the European economy, but also 4% of all EU CO2 emissions. This reduction requires fundamental, rapid and large-scale systemic transformations to fully decarbonise the global steel industry system. Thanks to digital technologies applied in steel production it will be possible to optimise processes, reduce energy consumption and improve the quality of the final products, nonetheless the digital transition is still in progress and technological solutions are still requested to make a better use of industrial data. As acknowledged by the CSP and SRIA, digitalisation is a key enabler for a sustainable and competitive EU Steel Industry. In this framework, SMARTChain aims at improving digitalisation in steel industry to go a step further in process control and optimisation, realising a horizontal integration in the steel value chain, through secure data sharing, promoting the interoperability of systems and tools to aim better quality of final and intermediate products, while optimising energy consumption and consequently reducing CO2 emissions, contributing to the achievement of the EU climate neutrality goal. Thus, the project will focus on the connection between steelmakers and steel users enabling an exchange of information devoted to the optimisation of the quality of final and intermediate products. Finally, steelmaking operators will be involved in the implementation of digital technologies through training programs that will allow to create a workforce that will make advantage of digital transformation. To reach these objectives a digital platforms for steelmakers and steel users will be developed for the data gathering from all the steps of the production process and to connect the quality of final products with material properties. Moreover, an Industrial Data Space and a Digital Material Passport will developed for secure data exchange and to guarantee the traceability of material information.

Collaborative robotics has established itself as a major force in pushing forward highly adaptive and flexible production paradigms in European large and small-medium enterprises. It is contributing to the sustainability and enhancement of Europe’s efficient and competitive manufacturing, to reshoring production, and to economic growth. However, still today the potential of collaborative technologies is largely underexploited. Indeed, collaborative robots are most often designed to coexist and to safely share a working space with humans. They are rarely thought to enter in direct socio-physical contact with humans to perceive, understand, and react to their distress or needs, and to enable them to work more productively and efficiently through better ergonomics. SOPHIA responds to this need by developing a new generation of socially cooperative human-robot systems in agile production. Its modular core technologies will enable dynamic state monitoring of the human-robot pair and anticipatory robot behaviours to: (1) improve human ergonomics, trust in automation, and productivity in manufacturing environments, and (2) achieve a reconfigurable, flexible, and resource-efficient production. By advancing the decisional autonomy and interaction ability of its innovative collaborative systems, SOPHIA will contribute to the reduction of work-related musculoskeletal disorders, the single largest category of work-related injuries and responsible for 30% of all workers’ compensation costs. SOPHIA’s societal relevance and the research groups’ experience in acceptability and standardization aspects of its core technologies will ensure their comfort-of-use by industrial workers, and the underlying design compliance to standards, thus strengthening the competitiveness in European manufacturing. We will illustrate and verify SOPHIA usability through the exploration of three real-world use-cases encouraging potential customers to integrate our core technologies in their workflow.

Proposal to include Hidria in FLEXCRASH project (101069674), which aims to develop a flexible and hybrid manufacturing technology based on applying surface patterns by additive manufacturing onto preformed parts. Aluminium alloys have been selected as the optimum material to build high performance structures, addressing both lightweight and environmental sustainability. They provide better recyclability, affordability (low CRM content), and costs than other material alternatives that would need complex developments for joining, recycling, and manufacturing. The property tailoring capacity offered by hybrid manufacturing will permit to develop a new type of crash-tolerant structures with outstanding performance under a wide range of impact angles and unexpected crash conditions. Structures will be defined according to the collision parameters identified by the different mixed traffic scenarios. Such tailored structures are the ideal solutions for dynamic active safety devices that allows displacement of crash structures to optimally face an imminent crash. Considering that the frontal crash is the most common (70%), a front-end structure has been chosen as demonstrator to validate the manufacturing developments, the modelling approach and the testing methodologies. The flexibility of the proposed technology will facilitate its transferability to other safety-related structures in vehicle’s locations with higher risk for passenger’s injuries while decreasing the number of materials and processes used to manufacture a crash structure. Simplify supply chain will turn into 20% manufacturing costs saving and reduce the risk of disruption. Virtual testing with improved reliability, validated by crash tests, will be used to propose new testing configurations, looking at the next step towards standardization. The application of Flexcrash solutions to the whole BiW offers a lightweighting potential up to 20% with improved safety (toward 50% less injuries and fatalities).