Inigo Flores Ituarte: Digital Manufacturing
According to Flores Ituarte the manufacture of products, both on-demand and near-demand, in low volumes, and with a high variety is the new paradigm of modern industrial activity.
“Digital manufacturing and design is fundamentally contributing to this new paradigm; and therefore, it is transforming the way we design, prototype, and optimize products and services, interact with technology, both at physical and virtual level, and plan and organise manufacturing systems, supply-chains, and society at large,” Flores Ituarte explains.
Flores Ituarte’s development plan at Tampere University is organised in three intertwined pillars that include digital manufacturing and design systems, physics-based and data-driven engineering design and manufacturing and lastly socio-technical aspects, sustainability and interdisciplinary research.
According to Flores Ituarte manufacturing will be transformed into a collaborative network of reconfigurable and interconnected entities. In his view, the future of industrial and manufacturing businesses will need to evolve from value extraction models to value creation and sharing models.
Society and factories of the future will need to evolve into decentralized networks of virtual firms, which are interconnected with value-adding digital manufacturing and design services.
“The raw material utilization, the engineering design, the manufacturing processes, and supply chain capacity will be digitally shared between firms and regulatory bodies to be monitored and optimized via the internet anywhere at any time to serve sustainable development goals needs.”
