Department of Systems and Control

Jožef Stefan Institute

Building blocks, tools and systems for the Factories of the Future - GOSTOP

Principal investigator:

Dr. Vladimir Jovan

Duration:

November 1, 2016 – April 30, 2020

Funding:

Ministry of education, science and sport, with EU sofinancing - Slovenian Smart Specilisation Strategy, Priority domain Factories of the Future

Abstract:

The aim of the proposed GOSTOP program is to accelerate the development of the Factories of the Future concept in Slovenia and to provide solutions to the current needs of Slovene industry, where some companies have already started to introduce this concept into their production facilities. In GOSTOP, 13 companies and 6 research organizations with compatible research and development programs in the Factories of the Future area joined forces to advance the concept. Taking into account the Smart Specialization Strategy of Slovenia prepared by SVRK and the priorities of the Factories of the Future roadmap under Horizon 2020 prepared by EFFRA, we identified 4 areas in which decisive breakthroughs can be achieved in Slovenia in the near future: control technologies, tooling, robotics, and photonics. This means that in GOSTOP we combined the majority of the horizontal fields pinpointed by the Smart Specialization Strategy of Slovenia documents for the Factories of the Future area. In all these fields we determined the most promising research topics that are interesting for Slovene industry and where the necessary knowledge in Slovene research organizations exists, and identified synergies between them. We combined several value chains in the program within which new products can be developed in the near future. This way, the competitiveness of Slovenian industry will be improved significantly. On the one hand, GOSTOP includes the development of new products and breakthrough technologies by agile SMEs. On the other hand, we will advance the overall Factories of the Future concept, leading to integrated systems that can be used by large Slovenian companies to optimize their production and develop new products with high added value. An example of such a product included in GOSTOP is the vision of a turnkey factory. The success of GOSTOP will contribute to raising both the added value and the export volume of the participating companies and Slovenian industry at large.