The Facendo 4.0 project reaches 84% execution in its second year, totalling 117 actions and an investment of 18.8 million euros.

The Facendo 4.0 project (Factory Competitiveness and Electromobility through Innovation and Digital Transformation), led by Stellantis Vigo, has reached 84% execution in its second year, according to the review of the state of progress of the ongoing actions carried out by the partners. A total of 117 actions have been carried out within the framework of this project, with a total investment to date of 18.8 million euros. Participating in this initiative are CTAG, Gradiant, Aimen and the University of Vigo, through its CINTECX centre and atlanTTic, a research centre that is part of the CIGUS Network. With an execution period of 31 months, ending in April 2023, Facendo 4.0 partners will invest a total of 22.3 million euros, with 12.2 million euros in public funding coming from the Galician Innovation Agency (Gain), and co-financed with ERDF funds from the European Union.

The initiative is based on three lines of research. The first, the Factory of the Future, aims to generate new knowledge on flexible production processes with a minimum carbon footprint for the manufacture of electric vehicles. The second, the Vehicle of the Future, studies new connected and intelligent systems and interfaces that drive the development of innovative products and devices for future ranges of electric vehicles. Finally, Connectivity and IT Infrastructure researches and assesses technologies associated with connectivity, IoT and the cloud to improve the performance (availability, security, automation, agility) and competitiveness of the IT infrastructure that serves processes and products.

UVigo’s role in the project Eco-friendly Factory and Smart Connectivity are the two work packages with which UVigo researchers are participating in Facendo 4.0. Green factory and Predictive maintenance are the most prominent activities of the Friendly Factory package, whilst the automation of resource management drives Smart Connectivity actions. It is precisely in the second package, Smart Connectivity, where researchers from the UVigo Centre and the CIGUS Network, atlanTTic, are actively involved. They are focusing on the design of an automated resource allocation system per network slice. This involves the application of network slicing, whereby multiple virtual networks can be created within a common physical infrastructure, dividing traditional network architectures into virtual elements that can be linked through software. This activity is expected to provide a full understanding of plant-level network architectures and their environment and an automated resource allocation system per network slice will become available.