Co-AIMS: Research Hub on Collaborative AI for Manufacturing Sustainability

Manufacturing plays a key part for achieving and going beyond NetZero by 2050. Manufacturing accounts for 14% of the UK territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and will be vital for making and maintaining the emerging technologies underpinning the green transition. Labour productivity is crucial to achieve the ambitions 2050 targets while growing our living standard with an aging population and low birth rate. UK Growth has been sluggish falling behind many peer economies. Manufacturing’s drive for connectivity and data has laid the foundation for digital technologies. However, the full gains in productivity and efficiency, can be realised only by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). Optimising, simultaneously: productivity, resilience, and sustainability exceeds human capacity. The advancement of AI offers unparalleled potential for manufacturing, by empowering people. Examples include adapting to radical demand & supply changes, managing complex sets of human and machine resources, or dexterously adapting to in-process variations. Humans and AI offer co-working, with automation could supercharge productivity by +36% while reducing emissions below 1990 levels.
The vision: Position the UK as a world leader in research and commercialisation of AI-empowered autonomous machines and systems to transform manufacturing productivity and sustainability for a net positive future by empowering people.
The aim: Deliver, collaboratively with manufacturing businesses, leading-edge technologies for robust, safe, trust-worthy, fault-tolerant, and co-operative autonomous AI systems for manufacturing and establish a platform for their design, development, testing, and validation.
Key objectives: defined with our stakeholders (users, providers, governance) to achieve future sustainable manufacturing and surpass NetZero by 2050:

Eliminate all waste and emissions in complex, interdependent manufacturing ecosystems (aiming for zero emissions and waste, zero downtime,...