Research Centre for Connected Factories

£5M from EPSRC through the ISCF Manufacturing Made Smarter Research Centres funding call.

The future prosperity of the UK will increasingly depend on building and maintaining a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector that can respond to changing supply and demand by adapting, repurposing, relocating and reusing available production capabilities. The pandemic which emerged in 2020 has influenced our perspective of future manufacturing operations and, in particular, has brought into focus the capacity challenges of delivering critical products and maintaining production in the face of major disruptions. It also accelerated the emerging trend for more localised, greener and cost-competitive indigenous manufacturing infrastructure with the ability to produce a wider set of complex products faster, better and cheaper. To meet the long-term structural and post-pandemic challenges, we need transformative new methods of building and utilising future factories by embracing complexity, uncertainty and data intensity in a dynamic and rapidly changing world.

Made Smarter Innovation Centre for Connected Factories project proposes a radical new approach to building the manufacturing infrastructure of the future based on autonomous morphing factories, which will challenge traditional manufacturing systems science.

This will allow future manufacturing operations to be delivered by ubiquitous production units that can be easily repurposed, relocated and redeployed in response to changing product requirements and volume demand.

The overall aim of the Centre is to create the next generation of factories in the UK to make manufacturing more efficient, adaptive, resilient, and robust in the uptake of digital technologies. The Centre supports different businesses in their digital transformation and aims to impact the wider society in delivering significant economic, societal, and environmental benefits from its research.