Pro­fes­sor Julien Le Duigou is the tit­u­lar chair-hold­er for Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing and a research sci­en­tist at UTC’s Rober­val lab­o­ra­to­ry. In par­tic­u­lar, he is respon­si­ble for the department’s «Inte­grat­ed Pro­duc­tion and Logis­tics» pro­gramme and, I par­tic­u­lar, for the “4.0 tech­nolo­gies” course.

Among the course’s aims? «The main objec­tive is to train mechan­i­cal engi­neers with a focus on indus­tri­al­iza­tion, pro­duc­tion man­age­ment and the sup­ply chain, as well as on con­tin­u­ous improve­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of so-called 4.0 tech­nolo­gies. This train­ing pro­vides under­grad­u­ates with skills rang­ing from those used in a meth­ods office which is respon­si­ble for defin­ing how to man­u­fac­ture and indus­tri­al­ize a giv­en prod­uct, to actu­al pro­duc­tion in fac­to­ries and final­ly dis­tri­b­u­tion of the prod­uct to cus­tomers», he explains.

First intro­duced in 2011, the con­cept of Indus­try 4.0 con­cerns the inte­gra­tion of new tech­nolo­gies in the fac­to­ry. «We’ve been able to inter-con­nect machines and allow­ing them to exchange infor­ma­tion there­by speed­ing up deci­sion-mak­ing in pro­duc­tion. The intro­duc­tion of new tech­nolo­gies in fac­to­ries, notably arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, the Inter­net of Things (IoT), dig­i­tal con­ti­nu­ity, the use of Big Data, robo­t­i­za­tion with Cobots equipped with sen­sors enabling them to col­lab­o­rate with an oper­a­tor, or new pro­duc­tion tech­nolo­gies such as met­al addi­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing, had as its main objec­tive the improve­ment of the factory’s over­all eco­nom­ic per­for­mance», he assures.

Industry 5.0

At the time, this was referred to as the 4th indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, fol­low­ing mech­a­niza­tion, elec­tri­fi­ca­tion and automa­tion. Today, we speak of Indus­try 5.0, «more an evo­lu­tion of the pre­vi­ous phase than a rev­o­lu­tion per se. Encour­aged and enhanced by the Euro­pean Union in 2021, this con­cept aims to redi­rect the way fac­to­ries oper­ate. Of course, these tech­nolo­gies will con­tin­ue to be used, but the empha­sis will now con­cen­trate on three aspects. Sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, by using these tech­nolo­gies to facil­i­tate com­pa­nies’ eco­log­i­cal and ener­gy tran­si­tion; resilience, or the abil­i­ty to adapt to haz­ards such as break­downs, sup­ply dis­rup­tions and mar­ket vari­a­tions, etc.; and last­ly, refo­cus­ing on the human ele­ment, whether in rela­tion to soci­ety at large or to the company’s own employ­ees, by putting oper­a­tors back at the heart of these tech­nolo­gies», explains Julien Le Duigou.

Is there any con­crete research work relat­ed to this Indus­try 5.0 theme? «In par­tic­u­lar, we are work­ing on opti­miz­ing plant pro­duc­tion by tak­ing envi­ron­men­tal indi­ca­tors into account. Our work focus­es on the impact of a pro­duc­tion sys­tem, in order to define an opti­mal mode of oper­a­tion in terms of ener­gy con­sump­tion, for exam­ple, and, more gen­er­al­ly, envi­ron­men­tal or soci­etal impact. The choice of a product’s man­u­fac­tur­ing process, the machines on which it will be made and the order in which it will be assem­bled are all opti­mized accord­ing to cost and lead-time indi­ca­tors, as well as envi­ron­men­tal and soci­etal indi­ca­tors. We are also work­ing on the theme of the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. In our case, this means help­ing com­pa­nies to recy­cle or even reuse, as far as pos­si­ble, the parts of end-oflife prod­ucts by help­ing them to dis­as­sem­ble them. This is called “Reman­u­fac­tur­ing”, and involves recre­at­ing new prod­ucts from old ones. We also work on prod­uct qual­i­ty: how to improve it so as to min­i­mize scrap, rejects and so on. To this end, we use com­put­er vision to detect defects in prod­uct appear­ance using machine learn­ing. Final­ly, we are work­ing on pre­dic­tive main­te­nance, which involves detect­ing the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a machine fail­ure before it hap­pens», he describes.

Genuine interest shown by manufacturers

These are themes which, quite nat­u­ral­ly, are of inter­est to a num­ber of man­u­fac­tur­ers. «We work with pro­duc­tion line man­u­fac­tur­ers such as ALFI Tech­nolo­gies, soft­ware pub­lish­ers such as PTC and man­u­fac­tur­ers such as Renault and Safran,» he adds.

But it’s not just the large com­pa­nies who are affect­ed by Indus­try 5.0. SMEs and ETIs are also impact­ed by new tech­nolo­gies. «For exam­ple, we have a future indus­try plat­form project enti­tled «Qua­tri­um» with the Cen­tre Tech­nique des Indus­tries Mécaniques (CETIM). Its aim? To be able to help SMEs and ETIs in the Hauts de France region to accel­er­ate their eco­log­i­cal, ener­gy and dig­i­tal tran­si­tion. In this project, the aim is first and fore­most to pop­u­lar­ize these con­cepts among com­pa­nies and then to take action to help them assim­i­late the var­i­ous tech­no­log­i­cal build­ing blocks. Hence the devel­op­ment of a plat­form, part of which is locat­ed at UTC, enabling them to see the tech­nolo­gies oper­at­ing in situ and to test them in real life», con­cludes Julien Le Duigou.

MSD