This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This book presents results relevant in the manufacturing research field, that are mainly aimed at closing the gap between the academic investigation and the industrial application, in collaboration with manufacturing companies. Several hardware and software prototypes represent the key outcome of the scientific contributions that can be grouped into five main areas, representing different perspectives of the factory domain:
1) Evolutionary and reconfigurable factories to cope with dynamic production contexts characterized by evolving demand and technologies, products and processes.
2) Factories for sustainable production, asking for energy efficiency, low environmental impact products and processes, new de-production logics, sustainable logistics.
3) Factories for the People who need new kinds of interactions between production processes, machines, and human beings to offer a more comfortable and stimulating working environment.
4) Factories for customized products that will be more and more tailored to the final user’s needs and sold at cost-effective prices.
5) High performance factories to yield the due production while minimizing the inefficiencies caused by failures, management problems, maintenance.
This books is primarily targeted to academic researchers and industrial practitioners in the manufacturing domain.
Tullio Antonio Maria Tolio is Full Professor of “Manufacturing and Production Systems” at Politecnico di Milano. He is the Director of ITIA-CNR (Institute of Industrial Technologies and Automation of the National Research Council of Italy).
During his career, he has covered the positions of: Head of the Ph.D. program in “Manufacturing and Production Systems” of Politecnico di Milano, Member of the Evaluation Board of Politecnico di Milano, Delegate of the Rector of Politecnico di Milano on "Quality assurance in education".
He has published more than 150 papers in international journals and international conferences. He has been Associate Editor of the “SME Journal of Manufacturing Systems”; he is currently member of the Editorial Board of the “CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology (CIRP-JMST)” and member of the Editorial Board of the “CIRP Annals”. He is Editor in Chief of “CIRP Encyclopedia of Production Engineering”.
He is “Fellow” of the CIRP (the International Academy for Production Engineering) and Member of the Directory Board of AITEM Italian Association for Manufacturing (Associazione Italiana di Tecnologia Meccanica); he has been visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
During his career he has taught more than 40 courses (10 credits each) including “Manufacturing”, “Integrated Production Systems” at Bachelor level, “Reconfigurable manufacturing systems” “Quality Management” at Master level in the degree programs of “Industrial Engineering” and “Mechanical Engineering”. During the last ten years, he has been teaching “Research Management” offered to all the PhD students of Politecnico di Milano.
