To make industrial manufacturing processes more robust and sustainable, the aim of the IQZeProd project was to develop new inline monitoring solutions for realizing a zero-defect production strategy. As a result, industry gained more confidence in inline monitoring systems and used such systems, for example, in the automotive, wood, and consumer goods industries.
The core idea of this project was to detect defects during the ongoing production process by fusing data from multiple sensors. In the state of the art, selective attempts had been made to improve specific sensor technologies or to introduce new sensors in specific production processes. In contrast, IQZeProd developed a scalable multi-sensor monitoring approach that could be applied to diverse manufacturing technologies and easily retrofitted with new algorithms and sensor principles. The result was to guarantee a defect-free end product at the end of the production chain by detecting all defects in the ongoing production process.
For validation purposes, technology cases in sheet metal forming, wood processing, as well as 3D printing were investigated in order to achieve practical cross-industry solutions.