The centre aims to develop a blueprint for the factories of the future that will be able to respond to changing market requirements by being resilient, adaptable, and reconfigurable. The centre is led by the University of Nottingham in collaboration with the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield and funded by EPSRC and the Made Smarter challenge.

The future prosperity of the UK will increasingly depend on building and maintaining a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector that can respond to changing supply and demand by adapting, repurposing, relocating and reusing available production capabilities. The pandemic which emerged in 2020 has influenced our perspective of future manufacturing operations and, in particular, has brought into focus the capacity challenges of delivering critical products and maintaining production in the face of major disruptions. It also accelerated the emerging trend for more localised, greener and cost-competitive indigenous manufacturing infrastructure with the ability to produce a wider set of complex products faster, better and cheaper. To meet the long-term structural and post-pandemic challenges, we need transformative new methods of building and utilising future factories by embracing complexity, uncertainty and data intensity in a dynamic and rapidly changing world.

The research will deliver the concept of the “connected morphing factories" as a platform for next-generation resilient connected manufacturing services where manufacturing operations to be delivered by ubiquitous production units that can be easily repurposed, relocated and redeployed in response to changing market demand.