Recent years have been marked by global scale occurrences including economic crisis and an unprecedented pandemic which have provided tremendous challenges on the manufacturing firms that had to rethink their production and business models. Under the new reality, reconfiguration has to consider many more dimensions than a simple rescheduling of pending orders. The production system itself needs to adopt both human and automated resources that can work together seamlessly or mutually exchange tasks, allowing the execution of any process plan in more than one, non-predetermined ways.

The ambitious vision of CONVERGING to bring together the advances of Big Data, AI, Robotics, and Social Sciences and Humanities for safer, more flexible, reconfigurable, and modular production environments requires multiple competences, engineering disciplines and an efficient implementation plan which will last 48-months.