Additive Manufacturing applications within food industry: An actual overview and future opportunities

The food sector is one of the major economic sectors in Europe and beyond and produces nutrition for the world population. Food industry has a unique role in all countries economy as it is essential to people lives. In Europe it is the largest manufacturing sector in terms of value added, turnover and employment. On the other hand, several worldwide economic-social-technological trends are pushing organizations to embrace innovation as an integrated part of their corporate strategy, and to offer customized products tailored to market targets need. Embracing innovation became strategic in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage and to stay ahead of the competition in every industry, even in food one. Today, among all the most cutting-edge technologies, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has the potential to develop business paradigms to face an ever changing demand. AM comprises a group of technologies whose initial inception occurred over thirty years, characterized by a layer upon layer production directly from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data. Over the past few years AM development has increased exponentially and has expanded to include new areas of research. Within all the innovative applications, one of the most promising under respect of social impacts and progress, has proved to be the technological application in the food industry. This scientific work aims at finding out potential touching points between additive manufacturing technologies and food market, either consumer and industrial, focusing on the actual and future applications

Additive manufacturing as a strategic tool for industrial competition

Additive Manufacturing (AM), often misleadingly referred to as 3D Printing (3DP), comprises of a group of technologies whose initial inception occurred over thirty years ago within the product design and development applications for the rapid prototyping of concepts, primarily using polymeric materials. Over the past few years AM development has increased exponentially and 3D Printing has expanded to include new areas of research such as 4D Printing, Nano AM, Contour Crafting and so on. However, a proper understanding of the technology's actual and potential benefits to industrial manufacturing has not been approached by practitioners and researchers in detail and industrial end-users risk missing the opportunity to make competitive choices due to the lack of an impartial and realistic overview. Real and tangible industrial benefits are often misunderstood due to the dissemination of information delivered with a mindset grown on a maker-side market, which misses to scope for AM in industrial applications. The aim of the paper is presenting a detailed overview of AM applications in the industrial world, focusing on the likely impacts on organizations and, moreover, to highlight and discuss the potential employments of the technology within the industrial value chain

Management integration framework in a shop-floor employing self-contained assembly unit for optoelectronic products

To establish practices and technological environments for using automated production systems in manufacturing of optoelectronic products, with characteristics of high customization of final products, of low volumes, make to order and especially of high manual activity is a challenge crucial for the future of manufacturing in Europe for this manufacturing sector. White’R is an FP7-FoF-EU Project where the main goal is to design and produce a modular- adaptive – self-containedreconfigurable robotic island in a white room for production of two different types of optoelectronic products with features described above: laser diodes and solar cells. In this paper the production planning, scheduling and control issues of white’R for HMLV optoelectronics is discussed and a management integration framework is proposed. The management framework presented in this work aims to sustain any company employing a self-contained automated and re-configurable robotic assembly island to organize and unify the development of its manufacturing capabilities still guaranteeing the alignment with the organizational strategy developed at the highest level of an organization. Two real cases are presented but the framework is applicable to any company in the sector analyzed. This is the first paper with application of a general framework for HMLV products in a white room based, self-contained highly automated assembly environment

A smart web-based maintenance system for a smart manufacturing environment

Maintenance is a practice in manufacturing that had never been available to remote control and management until the introduction of web-connected portable smart devices. In the last years several studies and applied research have been conducted for achieving this objective in an efficient way and with the aim to enhance the business activity related to. Remote access and role-specific data distribution can become the next level upgrade of maintenance, diagnostic and flow control management using smart sensors, actuators, and smart consumer devices (smartphone, tablet, etc.). In this project, a real case is presented, an Italian company, the end user of the project, tried to achieve this goal creating with the all consortium, a new web-services based server application in order to have remote access to the data stream, which permits to have the machine status available on the web, very strict time responses, a better user profiling and innovative control system based on smart devices monitoring real time machine data and sending notification sounds when needed. The result is a platform connecting, using the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, industrial machineries with a smart device android app and with a web application running on a normal browser