Miscellaneous general and special-purpose machinery

Tender description

The Centre for Aerospace Manufacturing (CAM) at the University Of Nottingham (UoN) works with partners from across the UK and European aerospace industry to deliver industrially focused research into aerospace assembly systems. Advanced manufacturing is a key research priority area for Nottingham and the University has invested significantly in this research. The University made a strategic investment in automated assembly infrastructure through the Future Automated Aerospace Assembly Demonstrator (FA3D) project, which was commissioned in 2016. Based on the success of this project, funding has been secured from the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) through the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) for development of the second phase of this demonstrator. The network infrastructure minimum requirements to enable real-time data acquisition, management and visualisation via interactive dashboards/HMIs are as follows. See Figure 8 for the data acquisition IoT architecture example. (a) UoN needs to capture data gathered from all intelligent sensors and metrology devices specified in Work Package 5: Precision assembly, or a selection of these sensors: — the data from the sensors needs to be categorised within the data store to perform analysis in order to gain insights into the automated processes, — the supplier must give UoN access to this data both programmatically through an API (Application Programming Interface) and through an interactive dashboard interface. (b) The installed system must be capable of presenting real-time information (of pre-selected process data captured by sensors) to the user via interactive dashboards on an HMI device (number of interfaces to be agreed). — These dashboards must be easily re-configurable and enable the user to view, select, edit, load and export process parameters. (c) The supplier must provide UoN with the ability to build its own interactive dashboards to visualise data from sensors and automated equipment. Access to baseline code is required wherever possible. (d) The installed system must be able to capture, store and re-call all historic process sensor data from the data store and know when (time and date) processes were carried out. (e) The supplier must connect to all required process sensors, PLCs and/or devices to enable data acquisition. (f) The installed system must be in accordance with the framework and requirements set out in Work Package 2: Smart Manufacturing and in collaboration with the successful tenderers of WP2.1 Modelling and Simulation,