Support for a European Metrology Network on advanced manufacturing

Various digitalisation concepts propose transformative improvements to production quality and efficiency, thereby boosting the competitiveness of Europe’s manufacturing industries. While overall production quality has improved in recent decades, the cost of quality issues still equates to between 5 and 40 % of total sales. Concepts like Industry 4.0, that combine automation and data exchange within manufacturing technologies and processes, offer new opportunities for innovation, including for emerging sectors such as additive manufacturing and nanotechnology. Here, production decisions would become reliant on measurement data that will need to be traceable and comparable for these decisions to be fully capable of trust. However, input from the metrology community has so far been insufficient to ensure certainty, prompting the formation of the Advanced European Metrology Network (AdvManuNet) to enhance interactions between metrology and stakeholder communities.

The project has helped develop the future network, promote dialogue between stakeholders, and plan for its sustained operation. In the lifetime of the project, a dialogue with important stakeholders has been nurtured, a Strategic Research Agenda and roadmaps published, knowledge-sharing developed, and plans made for a European metrology infrastructure in advanced manufacturing. By its conclusion, these measures will have accelerated the potential for uptake of innovative metrology serving the needs of advanced manufacturing, will have supported employment opportunities and skills, and opened up new ways for European manufacturers to compete globally.