Project R-16725

PV Smart Manufacturing and Automation Industry 4.0. (Research)

• Net congestion is severe in the programme area and surrounding countries, leading to a big motivator to further develop an Integrated PV (IPV) eco-system. The complete IPV value chain is labor intensive making it expensive and difficult to survive in Europe. • Therefore, the overall objective of the project is a more smooth value chain, with support of Smart Manufacturing and Automation and Industry 4.0-concepts. This needs to lead to cheaper IPV-product manufacturing and installation costs, and hence to a larger industry, both within the region as well as beyond. It links directly to the grand societal challenge of a greener and low carbon Meuse-Rhine area. • Cross-border cooperation of many project partners are needed for an improved process in the IPV value chain. These include hardware expertise (sensors, vision-systems, quality control), control algorithms, software development, and many integrator companies. All these companies (mostly SMEs) are present in the programme area. • State of the Art in IPV product development and manufacturing is a labor intensive process in which each (small) end-user request leads to multiple manual steps to design and install the custom-made system. Our project is the first of its kind to address all manual steps. • This will make the complete IPV-chain much smarter and therefore more smooth, faster and hence cheaper. It will lead to a significant growth in specific IPV-markets which are still virtually absent at the moment (e.g. solar noise barriers, PV-balconies, solar path ways, etc.) • Benefitting from our project will be (from downstream to upstream): end-users having a broader choice of affordable products (like mentioned: PV-balconies, etc.) that provide on-site PV-production, IPV-product integrators, (I)PV-manufacturers, component/material suppliers, SME's in smart manufacturing & Industry 4.0, and (indirectly) the grid-operators and governmental agencies that will face less net congestion. • This project is a very profitable opportunity for SME companies to benefit from the inevitable transition that climate change is pushing forward. If we do not develop those IPV-products ourselves, it will be the Chinese companies in the end that will do and also keep the financial profit of that. • To achieve our goals, there are three Main Activities (Work Packages) with each 5 Activities (Tasks) that have their own Deliverables. The main activities are WP1 'Feedback Loops for Smart Manufacturing' in which data driven Smart Manufacturing process optimization will be developed, WP2 'Automated Value Chain for Customized PV' in which a configurator framework will be developed that optimizes the full value chain from upstream PV-module production till end-user applications/installations, and WP3 'Knowledge Transfer, Education & Demonstration' in which an education program is developed with demonstration tools for the entire value chain of the IPV markets (BIPV, Infrastructure IPV, etc.) • The consortium consists of 16 Project Partners (PPs) coming from Belgium (5 PPs), Germany (4 PPs), and Netherlands (7 PPs). The type of these PPs are 10 companies (private entities) of which 9 are SMEs and 1 is a large enterprise. And 6 are public entities of which 4 are universities and applied universities, and the other 2 are research organizations (RTOs).

01 May 2026 - 30 April 2029