The FORMAT project aims at developing an innovative forecasting methodology, supporting decision making in manufacturing industries, facing and answering these three perspectives:
- Product Evolution: the design of new products can require new process technologies for the product itself to be manufactured.
- Technological Evolution: is the technological pressure, intrinsic technological evolution leads to changes and improvements in the manufacturing processes that must not be let unexplored.
- Organizational Evolution: to fulfill some industrial strategies, new processes with improved performance can be necessary
Figure 1. Three dimentional space of research.
The ideal direction to be pursued in developing the FORMAT innovative forecasting methodology is that new processes in Manufacturing Industries achieve a substantial gain in each dimension.
In the current common approach for White Good Industry and, generally in the manufacturing sector, manufacturing is involved at different stages of product development. Although the principle of “the sooner the better” is widely accepted, very often manufacturing is unprepared to address product driven technological changes due to limited resources to be dedicated to R&D of manufacturing processes. So there are other two industrial needs:
- to anticipate as much as possible the research and development of process technologies so as to eliminate uncertainties, infancy problems and related costs, and to better exploit competitive advantages in an aggressive market such as the White Goods one.
- to focus R&D resources on those technologies, which are the most promising along the above-mentioned three axes of evolution.
The final result of the project will be the development of an innovative Forecasting Methodology, backed by a web semantic IT tool, supporting decision making in Manufacturing Industries.
For more details: http://www.format-project.eu