RICAIP - Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production
Problem definition and objectives
The “Research and Innovation Centre for Advanced Industrial Production” RICAIP is one of the largest H2020 team projects and aims to create a distributed European centre of excellence in AI for industry. Within the framework of this project with a duration of six and a half years and a total funding amount of € 50 million, DFKI and partners, including the Technical University of Prague (CTU) and the Technical University of Brno (VUT), are building an open distributed testbed for experimenting complex, parallel and distributed manufacturing processes. The partners share the vision of a distributed pan-European research and innovation infrastructure. RICAIP also serves as a common roof for several already funded cooperation projects thematically related to the RICAIP vision, such as Cluster 4.0, MAS4AI.
The aim of the RICAIP project is to develop strong cooperation at international level and to further develop the concept of Industry 4.0. RICAIP will virtually link the test bed facilities in the Czech Republic (Prague, Brno) and Germany (Saarbrücken) and integrate them into a new Czech-German research infrastructure of advanced distributed industrial production.
The intention is to develop RICAIP as a European research infrastructure, the first of its kind in Europe. The RICAIP centre will become an international hub for Industry 4.0, in particular for multi-site industrial production and the development of multi-site production systems, and will transform industrial research in a more interdisciplinary way by bringing excellence and new solutions to the sector.
The idea of a geographically dispersed but virtually integrated experimental testbed with an open access policy will help to integrate research activities in this theme internationally and to leverage the huge investments of a wider SME community. This will also be a strong driving force for standardisation efforts. RICAIP will lay the foundations for intensive cooperation between industry and academia.
Procedure
The Research and Innovation Centre for Advanced Industrial Production (RICAIP) unlocks the research and innovation capacities of the CIIRC CTU and CEITEC BUT by building a strong partnership with leading German research institutions: DFKI and ZeMA, which jointly contribute to RICAIP by making their core facilities available and enabling RICAIP to operate on a decentralised basis. RICAIP will be established at the CIIRC CTU as an international centre working entirely in English. RICAIP will contribute significantly to upgrade the Institute from a national centre of excellence (CoE) in computer science, robotics and cybernetics to a European CoE for artificial intelligence and industrial robotics for advanced industry. To this end, RICAIP will build and develop the first distributed testbed for advanced industrial production (RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core), which will benefit both universities and companies. The RICAIP Industrial Testbed Core will be formed by integrating three local core facilities – the Prague testbed at the CIIRC CTU, the Brno testbed at CEITEC BUT (both significantly improved by RICAIP) and the existing Saarbrücken testbed – the joint facility of DFKI and ZeMA.
Current project status and results
Continuously.
