Smart product development and production

Manufacturing companies are facing a variety of challenges, such as increasing product and service complexity and rapid market changes. The firms need to react fast to the market changes, which are normally very different across nations and regions. They have to deal with several uncertainties, such as the impacts of the trade war and the impacts of the recent pandemic (COVID-19). This requires the firms to constantly innovate and adapt both product and production to remain competitive or, in some cases, just to survive. The research area of this proposal is within the concept of Industry 4.0, which has identified the trend of digitalization. We plan to investigate the next steps towards the Factory of the Future, by analysing how firms in Brazil, China and Denmark make decisions on adopting new technologies such as collaborative robots, product lifecycle management software solutions, digital twin and Virtual Reality technology, considering the differences in culture, in policy and in economics. Thereby, researchers from Brazil and China, who have complementary competencies to the researchers at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), are invited to the workshop and discuss the topics related to new technology in product development and production. Researchers from SDU will visit the labs at the partner universities afterwards. Based on these network activities while sharing knowledge and experience, we expect to build close relationships among the researchers, which will be the fundament of establishing long-term and concrete research collaborations among the partners.