Prof Conor McCarthy is director of Confirm, the new Science Foundation Ireland research centre based at UL. In this interview he discusses smart manufacturing and the ‘digital thread’ tying together the strands of the Industry 4.0.
Tell us about your academic career to date
I’m a native of Dublin but I’ve lived in the mid-west for the last 20 years. I became an academic in 2005, my research area is in joining up composite materials for lightweight structural applications in the automotive and aerospace industries.
I’m a mechanical engineer, I did my PhD in aircraft composite joining design for aircraft primary structure. Then I built my research career around the whole concept of joining. In the last couple of years I’ve become the assistant dean of research for the faculty of science and engineering at UL. Within that role I was asked to get the house in order for manufacturing. The first thing I did was put together an ‘appreciative enquiry’ framework which gets people to self-identify and we come together to identify our strengths in manufacturing. There were about 40 different stakeholders involved and we also did internal workshops to assess what our key strengths and ambitions were.
From all that we found 20 strong areas, and two or three distinctive capabilities. One of them was in the modelling of manufacturing but we knew that wouldn’t be strong enough for an SFI centre alone. So we reached out to Tyndall, UCC and our other academic partners and brought together a portfolio of expertise.
Our ethos is around industry 4.0 and the digitisation of manufacturing. Within that you need sensors, data analytics, decision-making algorithms and models. You need controls and a thing called a ‘digital thread’ – the software that links the virtual world to the real world. We’re going beyond automation to ‘smart automation’.
At the moment you have factories operating in Ireland today and they’re highly automated but they do the same thing every day. Consumers are now demanding customised products. In order for that to happen you the customer become a designer of the shoe. We’re moving away from a pipeline manufacturing process where you have the design and the pre-production then the manufacturing then the sales and marketing, then the customer. It’s a linear process.
With customisation the whole manufacturing and distribution process is changed and the robots are doing different tasks every day. Our centre is about creating the ICT loop that allows that to happen.
When you are looking to developing that loop, how did you go about identifying the skills you’d need have?
Take this example: picking up an object. What are the things you need to complete that task?
First, you need eyes are a vision system to see, that’s a sensor. Out of all the data you are taking in visually, your brain only needs to know one thing: the location of the object – so you need some data analytics to present only the information you need.
Then your brain has to make a decision based on its environment. That means you need an algorithm.
Then your brain sends that information to your muscles to pick up the object. That’s a control system.
What links all these together is a nervous system: the digital thread.
Seeing as we use software there is a security element, as well.
When we designed the centre we decided to bring in Tyndall National Institute for sensors; for data analytics we have UL, NUI Galway and UCC; UL is strong on decision-making algorithms; for control feedback we brought in CIT; then we brought in some of the ITs to look at applications such as polymer processing being done in Athlone.
When we had that finalised we reached out to different partners around Ireland and we assembled our consortium of academics. We have 36 academics active in the centre.
Being an SFI centre you need significant buy-in from industry. What kind of commercial partners are you working with?
We have 42 industrial partners who have pledged about €22.5 million in both cash and in-kind to the centre over the next six years. The SFI budget is €25 million. That’s a centre of approximately €47 million.
Our industry partners come from both the multinational and SME sectors, who are technology providers and end users. A lot of the SMEs would provide solutions to the multinationals, so we have a nice mix.
Our vision is to bring these companies together in collaborative projects where we have a number of academic institutions working with companies around key projects. One of them might be AI for manufacturing, another might be cognitive control. The idea is to build a collaborative research centre. It’s very easy to do 1:1 academic projects between an institution and a company. We want our centre to be a collaborative centre because the challenges are so great that we realise we’re going to need companies working together with our researchers.
What do you see as the main centre outputs?
In conversations with multinationals and Irish companies working with them, we have that MNCs compete with each other but they also compete with themselves. Johnson & Johnson could have 4,000 companies around the world on different sites. We think our primary point of business will be winning new business from existing companies already in Ireland.
Our headquarters will be in Limerick, will be a showcase for smart manufacturing research and demonstration and we will allow companies to bring their MDs in, show them around and try and win business for Ireland. That’s our main target.
We are also going to produce eight spin-out companies over the six years of the programme. That’s our target for spin-out companies. And then we’re also going to help SMEs grow their business.
Looking at how other centres are embracing entrepreneurial and media training, are these going to become part of the academic landscape?
Our centre is going to do technology development – that’s a given. We’re also going to work on education and outreach, and a community of practice.
There is a perception in Ireland that manufacturing is full of low-paid dirty jobs. It’s anything but. We need to change the perception of that all the way down to primary school level. The whole media engagement piece will be really important, so our researchers need the skills to communicate the importance of manufacturing at all levels of education nationally and internationally.
Manufacturing is a key driver for the Irish economy, it’s the second largest employer in terms of GDP. To maintain that we need a massive public engagement effort. The 160 people we’re going to educate to PhD and postdoctoral level will only make a small dent in that. We need to have undergraduate and public engagement programmes where we can address the lack of skills we need for this new revolution in manufacturing.
Then there’s the ‘community of practice’. The headquarters of Confirm at the University of Limerick will be a place companies can come and work with the researchers in an open plan space. The reality of smart manufacturing in Ireland is we have to come together. We have to get the vocabulary right, getting the definition of what these things are correct, and that can only happen if you’re working together.
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