The Research Centre for Connected Factories focuses on factories of the future and technologies to enable manufacturers to respond to changing market requirements by being resilient, adaptable and reconfigurable. The Centre is led by University of Nottingham in collaboration with University of Cambridge, University of Sheffield and Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), and funded by EPSRC and the Made Smarter challenge. 

 

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 Covid-19 pandemic has influenced our perspective of future manufacturing operations and, in particular, 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 these long-term structural 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. 

 

The Centre is delivering the concept of the “connected morphing factories" as a platform for next-generation resilient connected manufacturing services where manufacturing operations can be delivered by ubiquitous production units that can be easily repurposed, relocated and redeployed in response to changing market demand.