E-Composites

Objectives 

The market for composites is growing steadily, including commodity type applications in the automotive, civil infrastructure, and other emerging markets. A major obstacle to achieving the full potential of composite structures in many applications is cost-effective manufacturing.

The industrial objective of the E-Composites project lies in the creation of a multi-agent-based infrastructure that will assist composite manufacturers, equipment and tooling manufacturers, product designers and process engineers in developing new and better products, optimising processes, choosing equipment configurations and materials from a wide range of suppliers by providing them with a tool to assist them in evaluating cost reduction strategies so that they can confidently make decisions early on during the design phase. The model will offer support in the selection of materials and composite manufacturing processes for both novel and expert users using multi-agent technology that will determine the degree of knowledge of the user and provide default values if needed.

The economic objective of the project will be to provide a tool that will assist in the up-take of the composites industry.

Description of the work

The project will focus on the development and application of advanced computing techniques to solve the problems of cost-effective manufacturing design, processing and control in composites. By its very nature this thrust will be cross-disciplinary, teaming both formally and informally, computer scientists, researchers in composites engineering, composites designers and production personnel.

Initial market research will be required to identify the needs, technological level, foreseen benefits, etc. of potential users of the proposed technology. This will be achieved through an extensive mailing (ordinary mail and via Internet) and personal interviews. The knowledge base will span the production tasks of materials selection, process selection, and process design and will encompass the experience of seasoned designers as well as theoretical models based on first principals. Composites technology knowledge will be gathered mainly from partners and RTD performers. The research seeks to capture the human solving knowledge used in composites, organise this knowledge and other numerical computing required for the control and design activities, and provide the computer software frameworks to strategically exercise this knowledge. This will result in the development of a cost estimation model for composites and bio-composites, providing users with a sufficient knowledge base to resolve problems and assist decision-making in composite cost issues.

The global architecture of the application will be defined and the multi-agent system developed. The proposed system will be validated among the partners and other applications will be analysed.