About us

Machineries & Factories (M&F) is a research platform with 200 experts creating industrial impact.

M&F organisation

We are one of the IOF business development centres of Ghent University and as such part of the Industrial Liaison Network. We group the activities of over 40 professors, and 300 researchers from the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture and the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Our total income per year is around €21M per year, of which 10% directly from industry, 25% from Horizon Europe and 65% from regional funding for strategic basic research.

Vision

We aim to IMPACT the productivity of smart machines and factories

Partnering with industry
Leveraging on our excellent research (concretized in novel concepts, models, algorithms, tools and hardware (prototypes, test infrastructure)
Incorporating industry 4.0 and 5.0 concepts and objectives,
Capitalising on our thorough understanding in electromechanical, industrial systems and business engineering.

Application areas include: AgriTech, Process Industry, Transport and logistics, Healthcare operations, Defense, Smart Manufacturing and Sustainable Energy

Mission

In view of realising our vision, we

Are an excellent research, development and innovation partner
Inspire industry by identifying, communicating and bringing to the market tangible research results, ,
Create and make available relevant test infrastructure
Realise spin-offs if the existing eco-system is not (yet) able to absorb our research results

How we work with industry

There are several ways we can work with you, examples are:

Bilateral research projects wherein our expertise strengthens your innovation projects and speeds up time to market
Subsidized research projects (e.g. VLAIO research project or VLAIO development project)
Longer term strategic company projects leading to an in-house PhD e.g. VLAIO Baekeland
Service agreements based on our test infrastructure and tools
Service agreements to tackle a burning challenge, in Flanders we are a 'registered technology provider' in the KMO portefeuille
Subsidized multi-partner research projects working along the value chain or on the same technology from different applications in Flanders (e.g. FLanders Make ICON projects) or in Europe (e.g. H2020 Factory-of-the-Future (FoF))

Strategic alignment

We align our activities with the Flemish strategic research centre for the manufacturing industry Flanders Make. Many of our researchers have a double affiliation FlandersMake@UGent.

Some of our researchers have a double affiliation UGent-imec.

Next to this, we are a member of ai.ugent.be and contribute to the Flanders AI Research program.

Context

We are working in the field of Machineries & Factories framed within the fourth/fifth industrial revolution (industry 4.0/5.0).:

Smart motion products (industrial machines, robotics, energy applications and vehicles), and
Smart production systems (assembly, batch, continuous processes or operations).

The fourth industrial revolution is driven by connectivity: motion products and production systems will remain in data connection.

This brings along exiting new concepts including cyber-physical systems, vertical & horizontal integration, end-to-end engineering and human-worker 4.0 concepts. We make machines and factories smarter through flexible, reliable and performing hardware and software (control). As such it will allow new business models to emerge such as lot-size one production at the cost of series production and XaaS (X as a service).
We can see an increasing dependency between products and productions systems.
- Machines resp. Factories need to be DESIGNED in view of capabilities of factories (e.g. assembly) resp. industrial machines.
- During factory OPERATION the industrial machines (e.g. robots, drilling &, 3D printing machines) realise key steps in the manufacturing of (motion) products. The performance (e.g. in terms of quality and energy efficiency) of the factories and machines are mutually impacted by their performance.
- Finally, some machines could be considered as factories on wheels (e.g. off road agricultural vehicles), and flexible assembly systems increasingly rely on mobile transportation systems (AGV).

The Fifth Industrial Revolution marks a paradigm shift from pure digital automation toward a human-centric, sustainable, and resilient industry, where humans and smart machines and factories work together.

Digital twins and artificial intelligence (AI) are key enabling technologies.

Our vision is that the strength of digital twins and AI is only fully enabled by the incorporation of domain specific and expert knowledge.
This domain specific and expert knowledge can present itself in the form of multi-physical, scalable models; traditional control loops or optimisation routines; and knowledge graphs drafted by humans.

We believe the human factor will remain key and might even increase.

The human designer or quality manager needs to be provided with actionable and interpretable decision support systems. The (assembly) operator needs to receive information with state-of-the-art (immersive) technology to flexibly adapt the operation in order to improve the performance of the product or production system whether it is in view of energy efficiency, quality or life time. In all this, the environmental impact should be considered.

Support for our researchers

M&F assists the researchers in

Making the research results more tangible and industrially relevant
Turning research results into real life by collaborating with industry
Building an industrial network and setting up and managing multi-partner projects
Setting up spin-off companies for research results that cannot yet be absorbed by industry today