The Furniture, Wood and Packaging Technology Institute, AIDIMA, has participated in the R&D European Project FITMAN: “Future Internet Technologies for MANufacturing industries”, (http://www.fitman-fi.eu/) in the Future Internet FP7 program, financed by the European Union. The project has lasted 30 months and its achievements are now part of the new Industry 4.0.

The final review of the project FITMAN took place on 26 and 27 of November 2015 in Brussels, obtaining a very good optimal final evaluation. FITMAN has been an initiative resulting of the agreement between 36 organizations from 11 European countries which catalogs it as a large and very challenging project. These companies belong to heterogeneous sectors such as aerospace, automotive, textile, construction, software engineering and furniture among others.

Figure 1 -AIDIMA Project Review

The mission of the FITMAN project has been to provide the FI PPP Core Platform (The Future Internet Public-Private Partnership, a European program for Internet innovation, https://www.fi-ppp.eu/) with 10 industry-led use case trials in the different domains of Smart, Digital and Virtual Factories.  The use case trials belong to several manufacturing sectors such as automotive, aeronautics, white goods, furniture, textile/clothing, LED lighting, plastic, construction, and manufacturing assets management.

AIDIMA in collaboration with the UPV (http://www.upv.es) was in charge of the implementation of the furniture industry trial which was distributed in three use cases namely, Furniture Trends Forecasting for Product Development, Opinion Mining in Furniture Products and Collaborative Work for Product Design.  These use cases addressed the need of decision makers in the furniture sector for automated tools that could really make an impact on their daily activities.  For instance, trends analysts while searching for potential trends on the internet from well-reputable sources, analysts and designers while analyzing furniture customer opinions in Facebook and twitter, and managers and designers when getting together to develop new products based on all the information gathered before.  It can be all summarized in one sentence: Innovative product design using the customer voice.

The challenges faced were many such as the large amounts of unstructured sources with high volumes of information and no relation among each other that analysts must face, the manual processes being done, thus stealing “think time” from analysts, the lack of solutions to investigate final customers opinions, the absence of collaborative tools when designing new products and the potential to collaborate being reduced geographically (location dependent collaborative processes).  AIDIMA succeeded addressing all these challenges thanks to their work on the FITMAN project.

Figure 2 – AIDIMA’s Future Internet Platform for Market Research, Trends Forecasting and Product Innovation

It should be noticed the participation of the company Diseños Tapizados Muñoz during the validation of the platform.  General Manager, Antonio Muñoz can be seen in the videos addressing the furniture sector current difficulties and how FITMAN can solve them. Special thanks to DTM company for his participation.

During the final review, the platform and the experiences of three use cases were presented to the reviewers as well as the achievements and conclusions obtained during the project.  These were the increase of efficiency while searching for potential trends and therefore, the automated handling of that information, the time savings analyzing user and sentiment opinions shared on the internet by furniture buyers, the quicker decision making process which yields into more alternatives in designs, more proposals that can bel shared in a collaborative environment, a higher involvement of key players in all aspects of design process making such process richer and more effective.

Focusing on the collaborative environment, it is important to highlight the workshop held in AIDIMA headquarters in Paterna before the end of the project on September 29, 2015.  Among the attendees there were architects, designers, product development managers and furniture professionals as well as federations and commerce associations, furniture manufacturing companies and training centers.  The presentation was arranged to offer an overview of FITMAN in general, and what’s behind it, and to present the work done during the project of AIDIMA and UPV and the components developed.  As a result of this, several of the companies attending the workshop participated on a real testing of the collaborative platform. The participants were able to experience how all actors involved in the project could interact and share all necessary documents to carry out the task, such as the technical specifications for the sofa (dimensions, materials, etc.), sketches, 3D designs, the product brief, video conference, notes, etc.

Figure 3 – AIDIMA workshop for collaborative environments

FITMAN as a project has concluded, but not its legacy. Fitman Innovation Lab has been created to technically demonstrate the capabilities and achievements of FIWARE for Industry technologies to realize more competitive business process focused ICT services (collect information better, analyze & decide faster). The demonstration services to industry should be connected both with the technical capabilities (FIWARE for Industry assets) as well as business process demonstration (FIWARE-enabled Industry 4.0 Trials).  More information can be found at  http://www.fitmanovationlab.eu/

Project consortium members (http://www.fitman-fi.eu/consortium):

• TXT E-SOLUTIONS SPA (Italy)
• LABORATOIRE VIRTUEL EUROPEEN DANS LE DOMAINE DE L’INTEROPERABILITE DES ENTREPRISES AISBL (Belgium)
• PORTUGAL TELECOM INOVACAO SA (Portugal)
• ENGINEERING – INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA (Italy)
• POLITECNICO DI MILANO (Italy)
• TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT (Finland)
• UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON (UK)
• ATOS SPAIN SA (Spain)
• NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS (Greece)
• ASOCIACION DE EMPRESAS TECNOLOGICAS INNOVALIA (Spain)

Original Equipment Manufacturers (4)

• VOLKSWAGEN AG (Germany)
• TRW AUTOMOTIVE ESPANAN SL (Spain)
• WHIRLPOOL EUROPE SRL (Italy)
• AGUSTA WESTLAND SPA (Italy)

SME Networks & Associated S/T (14)

• FRATELLI PIACENZA S.P.A. (Italy)
• SOFTECO SISMAT SRL (Italy)
• APPLICATIONS PLASTIQUES DU RHONE SAS APR (France)
• UNIVERSITE LUMIERE LYON 2 (France)
• CONSULGAL – CONSULTORES DE ENGENHARIA E GESTAO SA. (Portugal)
• UNINOVA – INSTITUTO DE DESENVOLVIMENTO DE NOVAS TECNOLOGIAS (Portugal)
• TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION NETWORK LIMITED (UK)
• COVENTRY UNIVERSITY (UK)
• COMplus Automation GmBH (Germany)
• FRAUNHOFER-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FOERDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG E.V (Germany)
• UNIVERSITE BORDEAUX I (France)
• AIDIMA (Spain)
• UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE VALENCIA (Spain)
• GEOLOC SYSTEMS (France)

Open Call Winners

• BIBA – Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH (Germany)
• DATAPIXEL (Spain)
• DFKI The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Germany)
• DITF – The German Institutes for Textile and Fiber Research Denkendorf (Germany)
• FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik (Germany)
• HOLONIX (Italy)
• Nissatech Innovation Centre (Serbia)
• STI – Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck (Austria)

Important AIDIMA – FITMAN links to visit:

AIDIMA Factsheet for FITMAN:

http://demos.txt.it:8095/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FITMAN-AIDIMA-Trial-fact-sheet1.pdf

AIDIMA Furniture Trends Forecasting and Collaborative Product Design:

http://demos.txt.it:8095/?portfolio=aidima-furniture-trends-forecasting-and-collaborative-product-design

AIDIMA Trial Furniture Production:

AIDIMA Trial – Trends Forecasting and Collaborative Product Design: