About the Project

Manual work is a crucial and expensive component of manufacturing. Globalization causes companies to reduce manual work costs by offshoring and global outsourcing. This poses problems such as increased lead times, lower quality products and services, and weaker management. Because of the pressure of globalization and the decline of the working age population in Europe, the situation will get worse in sectors with a large proportion of high value manual work that cannot be automated or outsourced. The ManuVAR project aims to provide a timely and systematic solution to this problem.

The objective of ManuVAR is to develop an innovative technology platform and a framework to support high value manual work throughout the product lifecycle. ManuVAR will cover ergonomics, safety, work assistance, and training. It includes various people from designers to factory workers, operators, maintenance personnel, and end-users.

ManuVAR consortium comprises 18 partners representing industry, research and academia. In ManuVAR, there are five synergistic application clusters in different industrial areas: terrestrial satellite assembly, assembly line design, remote maintenance of trains, maintenance of nuclear reactors, large machine assembly process design.

Virtual Model Graphic shows the traditional uni-directional
flow of information and knowledge using blue arrows
and the ManuVAR bi-directional flow using white arrows.

The main aims:

• Increase productivity and quality and reduce cost of high value manual work in the whole lifecycle;
• Facilitate adaptation to product customization and changes;
• Support efficient knowledge and skill management through the lifecycle;
• Improve EU industry competitiveness via knowledge-based business models.

Means:

• Prototyping manual work in virtual reality;
• Capturing feedback from experienced factory workers, maintenance personnel, operators using VR / AR, making use of this feedback at the design stage, throughout the entire lifecycle, and across subsequent system generations;
• Accumulating, transforming, updating, and reusing the created models and gathered information at all stages of the system lifecycle in the PLM/PDM framework.