EU shipbuilding leading edge relies in the complexity, quality, customization, delivery time and lifecycle services (e.g. in situ maintenance, repair and retrofitting) of the vessels manufactured. However, in the last decade, EU small and medium-sized shipyards (SME) have experienced a competitive drawback in their market segments due to an increase of competition from other global regions that benefits from lower labour costs or higher automation degree. Moreover, SME shipyards must also overcome a major impediment related with capital investment that can overwhelm the part cost for shipbuilding. As a result, current automation solutions based on large monolithic equipment, are not still valid for increasing productivity in SME shipyards. Therefore, shipbuilding, and especially SME shipyards, needs novel cost-effective, reconfigurable, modular and flexible worker-centric methodologies capable of improving worker’s performance and ensuring quality and precision in the execution of the labour-intensive tasks.

Mari4_YARD aims the implementation of a portfolio of worker-centric solutions, by relying on novel collaborative robotics and ubiquitous portable solutions, enabling modular, reconfigurable and usable solutions targeting the execution of labour-intensive tasks by preserving industry-specific workers’ knowledge and skills. Moreover, replicability and early-adoption of the portfolio of technologies by other SME-shipyards is ensured through several actions on training, technology assessment, benchmarking… by establishing a pan-European network of Didactic Factories, offering general-purpose testbeds and showrooms, as well as providing upskilling and re-skilling of shipyards workforce.

In the Mari4_YARD project, the CMT will contribute its experience in the fields of production technologies, life cycle analysis and simulation. CMT will use software tools and the above-mentioned knowledge to evaluate the solutions found with regard to economic as well as ecological aspects. Furthermore, CMT will contribute to making the results accessible to the maritime community by organising information events.

Consortium

This project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.