Manufacturing companies are continuously facing the challenge of operating their manufacturing processes and systems in order to deliver the required production rates of high quality products of increasing complexity, with limited use and waste of resources. "Zero Defect Manufacturing" (ZDM) is a recent paradigm aiming at going beyond traditional six-sigma approaches in highly technology intensive and strategic European manufacturing sectors through new knowledge-based approaches. The ZDM paradigm is of key importance to manage production quality targets in advanced manufacturing industries. The implementation of this paradigm in industry requires innovative defect management and control methods, novel technologies for in-line inspection and integration of knowledge management and ICT tools for smart and sustainable decisions in complex industrial scenarios, which are not available in the market. The aim of the ForZDM project is to develop and demonstrate tools to support the rapid deployment of ZDM solutions in industry and design more competitive and robust multi-stage manufacturing systems. The proposed ZDM approach is based on the combined adoption of new knowledge-based data-gathering and root-cause analysis solutions to reduce the generation of defects as well as new on-line defect management and improved production traceability solutions to mitigate the propagation of defects along the production line stages. This will be achieved through the proper integration of innovative enabling technologies, such as cyber-physical systems, selective inspection, advanced analytics and integrated process and part-flow control solutions.

GHAIA will promote excellence through mobility to the world leader Universities in pure and applied mathematical research: Princeton University, Mit, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the Universities of California, of Texas, of Houston, of Pittsburgh, the Washington University (St. Louis), and the Worchester Polytechnical Institute, the Academia Sinica, the University of Buenos Aires have joined the consortium. European researchers will have the extraordinary opportunity to work in their exciting environment as well as receiving visiting researchers from south America. Moreover two selected enterprises have joined the consortium, allowing intersectorial mobility: Marposs and GMV, leaders in the strategic sectors of EU industry of precision equipments for automatic inspection, and of satellite navigation. Emerging technological problems call for the development of a new integrated framework of geometric and harmonic analysis, which unify in an original picture problems strongly influenced by symmetries and coming from different mathematical and technological fields. The exploitation of groups and supergroups invariances is one of the central goals of harmonic analysis, and nonlocal or nonlinear PDE in group setting present new and unexpected properties. Achievements in these directions are strictly related to a good geometric analysis of the ambient space. With these instruments we will be able to contribute to some of the biggest challenges of this century: data analysis and models of brain functionality. The final goal will be to obtain new geometrical instruments of machine vision, to be applied to develop new products for measurement of industrial processes and for satellite guidance. The international collaborations, through research and secondments, with the extraordinary selected third countries institutions of the consortium, will provide very high level transfer of knowledge and will have a strong impact on the research capability of the EU sending institutions.