This proposal is submitted by three mature regional cluster organisations operating in the UK (Midlands Aerospace Alliance - MAA), Netherlands (Netherlands Aerospace Group - NAG) and Italy (Torino Piemonte Aerospace - TPA) that act as innovation agencies operating in the high-growth aerospace industry. Our common challenge is how best to design and utilise cluster mechanisms, including cluster organisation service delivery, to address a recognised strategic weakness in Europe’s aerospace supply chains. Despite often high levels of technical know-how, smaller companies have a low rate of product and process innovation. Our goal is to accelerate rates of innovation in aerospace supply chain companies so they are better equipped with new products and new processes to compete in global markets and thus retain and grow a high-skill, high-wage aerospace supply chains in Europe’s aerospace clusters. Our organisations have developed what is considered within our regional clusters to be good and successful – possibly excellent -- practice. A range of services is delivered, in part by mobilising the clusters themselves as a resource. Service delivery systems include small grant competitive collaborative R&D programmes, innovation mentoring, working closely with regional RTOs to involve suppliers and participating in EU-funded “meta-cluster” programmes -- all designed to increase the rate of SME innovation. Our proposal is to use our inevitably-diverse expertise based on these experiences to comparatively benchmark the recognised good practice and create a Design Options Paper that contextualises this within the broader range of service delivery models. We then have a clear plan to share the resulting knowledge for maximum impact, first within our own clusters, secondly across the big community of European aerospace clusters, and thirdly with the broader innovation/SME and cluster policy communities which work in other economic sectors.

Assembly of final products in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical and medical industries is a key production process in high labour cost areas such as the UK. To respond to the current challenges manufacturers need to transform current capital-intensive assembly lines into smart systems that can react to external and internal changes and can self-heal, self-adapt and reconfigure. This need is dictated by: (1) demand for rapid ramp-up and downscale of production systems; (2) the fact that current assembly systems lack autonomous responsiveness to disruptive events and demand fluctuations; (3) an economics and societal drive towards 'manufacturing as a service'. Consequently, there is a need for a radically new approach towards development of future assembly systems able to continuously evolve to respond to changes in product requirements and demand with extremely short set-up times combined with low cost of maintenance, system reconfiguration and capability upgrade with emerging new technologies. As the level and type of automation changes, future assembly systems will also require a different type of engagement of human operators in hybrid decision-making, monitoring and system adaptation. The proposed research brings together a multidisciplinary and multi-sector partnership drawing upon skills from across the University of Nottingham with an established track record in multi-disciplinary transformative research, and industries representing key high value manufacturing companies together with their representative bodies. The goal of the research programme is to define and validate the vision and support architecture, theoretical models, methods and algorithms for Evolvable Assembly Systems as a new platform for open, adaptable, context-aware and cost effective production. The research programme will deliver a new paradigm shift in adaptable and cost effective manufacture that breaks with traditional approaches and is predicated on an innovative intertwining of the following foundational research challenges in complex collective adaptive manufacturing systems: Product-Process-System Evolution; Data Analytics; Knowledge Modelling; Emergence Engineering; and Open Manufacturing. These fundamentally 'collective', pillars for a new extremely flexible and evolvable manufacturing infrastructure are expected to shed new insights on the self-configuration, self-organisation, self-adaptation and evolution of future production platforms. Together the pillars will presage a game-changing strategy for industry's ability to respond and solve current and future societal grand challenges linked to retaining and expanding manufacturing operations in the UK. The research will ultimately enable a compressed product life cycle through the delivery of robust and compliant manufacturing systems that can be rapidly configured and optimised, thus reducing production ramp-up times and programme switchovers. This will lead to increased opportunities for new, small and independent production stakeholders, particularly those involved in the realisation of product, process and assembly system co-evolution. Our approach of building an underlying architecture, using simulated and real-world data to test and populate models, and working closely with industry stakeholders, will ensure scalable and adaptable approaches that will be transferable between different manufacturing sectors.

UK economic prosperity will increasingly depend on maintaining and further expanding a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector based on sophisticated technologies, relevant knowledge and skill bases, and manufacturing infrastructure that has the ability to produce a high variety of complex products faster, better and cheaper. In high labour cost economies, manufacturing competitiveness will depend on maximising the utilisation of all available resources, empowering human intelligence and creativity, and capturing and capitalising on available information and knowledge for the total product lifecycle from design, through production, use and maintenance to recycling. It will also require an infrastructure that can quickly respond to consumer and producer requirements and minimise energy, transport, materials and resource usage while maximising environmental sustainability, safety and economic competitiveness. Building on the latest developments in Informatics, Computer Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing Systems Science, we will address these needs with a research programme centred on the concept of 'Cloud Manufacturing', which has been defined as ''a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable manufacturing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction''. The research will adopt the methods of cloud computing and crowdsourcing. The 'cloud' allows a range of data sources within design and manufacturing processes to be shared and mined to enable process optimisation and increase responsiveness; the crowds encompass manufacturing partners, designers, logistics partners, and consumers who are sources of potentially valuable data, information and product and process knowledge that can be elicited for optimising complex manufacturing environments. The approach admits new models for open innovation within the manufacturing space, enabling new enterprises to arise without a need for a large capital investment. The research programme is a radical departure from the current philosophy of manufacturing ICT - it will create a framework for participatory contribution of information from the actual manufacturing entities and support services to the consumers and users of products. This transformational approach presents theoretical, technical, practical, ethical and social challenges that we will meet through new fundamental multidisciplinary research. Whilst there have been some tentative steps taken to harness cloud concepts in manufacturing the theoretical methods, infrastructure and scientific knowledge needed to deliver the full potential of future cloud manufacturing have yet to be established. We aim to develop a holistic framework and understand its role within global manufacturing networks through: seeking the appropriate products, sectors, scales and volumes; identifying the impacted lifecycle stages from design to manufacture, maintenance and re-cycling; understanding how new product design and manufacturing will be influenced by lifecycle data; and finally analysing how future products will be influenced by cloud manufacturing enabling local on-demand supply of components and services. Cloud Manufacturing provides far reaching opportunities but has major research challenges including: understanding the diverse resource base, both in design collateral and production facilities; incorporating and integrating customer/user intelligence; and the representation and processing of information within a secure open service-oriented platform.

NIMRC's research portfolio is at the heart of the national manufacturing agenda and is active in the generation of patents and the construction of full scale demonstrators to enhance technology transfer. The Centre has strong links with industry in a range of sectors including aerospace, automotive, instrumentation, power engineering, steel, textiles and clothing, and consumer product sectors. With the exception of a small number of blue-skies projects, all projects are driven by industrial need. During the past 3 years, the Nottingham Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (NIMRC) has continued to succeed in its stated objectives. By exploiting synergies between themes and research strands within the Centre and with other academic groups and industry outside the Centre, NIMRC has continued to expand its world-leading research portfolio and develop new directions. From a start of 8 principal investigators in the IMRC, this year we have an additional 15 investigators participating in current projects within the portfolio, complemented by 22 researchers and 29 research students. In the past 3 years, 9 students have been been awarded a PhD and another 7 are currently submitting their dissertations.The quality, timeliness and novelty of NIMRC's research is highlighted by its publication record. Since the Centre began, staff have published widely in peer review journals and presented at prestigious international conferences.The IMRC status has attracted a wider research community both in the University and without. The NIMRC continues to develop strategic partnerships with research groups outside the University and include many internationally recognised centre's of manufacturing excellence. The Centre also has strong links with other IMRCs. Already, NIMRC has collaborative research projects with Warwick, Bath, Cranfield and Loughborough IMRCs. NIMRC is also participating in the Grand Challenge 3D Mintigration related to the economic Manufacture of 3D Miniaturised Devices . NIMRC has made excellent progress during the last 3 years towards its stated objectives. It believes that the future research strategy it has developed will continue to address both the immediate and longer term needs of the manufacturing industry and it looks forward to providing the enabling research needed to improve the competitiveness of UK plc. The importance of NIMRC's world-class research is demonstrated in the composition of the Industrial Advisory Board which includes 20 senior industrialists from well established UK manufacturing sectors. The Board is impressed with the work of the Centre and the rapport with the Board of PIs. Board members have their own examples of how their company has benefited from the work of the NIMRC. In summary, Rolls-Royce and the Industrial Advisory Board fully support the activities of the NIMRC and will continue to do so. Chair of NIMRC Industrial Advisory Board, Mr Stephen Burgess, Manufacturing Process and Technology Director, Rolls-Royce Plc.