Factories of the Future: strategic roadmap for European productivity

In order to face the challenge of the global competition, the European manufacturing industry will increasingly be forced to concentrate on specific issues providing a large competitive advantage through long-term innovation at the factory level.

A key factor to strengthen European leadership in product and process engineering and in the development of manufacturing systems, both discrete and continuous, will be the ability to achieve cost efficiency, high performance and enhanced robustness, in a context of increasing product variability and continuously changing product volumes.

In the present scenario of global market competition, the R&D challenges to achieve a higher competitiveness of the manufacturing systems should be considered in terms of general evolution drivers, such as cost efficiency, with extensive adoption of standards in production machinery, equipment and controls and massive use of the lean approach.

The entire strategic roadmap can be found in the document "Factories of the Future ppp".