Dan Högberg
School of Engineering Science
Francisco Garcia Rivera
PhD Student
The ongoing electrification of the automotive industry will initially lack competence, it is new knowledge that is required to take the automotive industry to the next phase. According to the EC, the loss of skills within the battery cell plants is estimated to be up to 800,000 people until 2025. And even the industry would have enough people, the factories are not yet built, which makes it impossible to train the person on site.
In order to speed up both skill development and skill exchange within the industry, the PLENUM (PLENary multi-User development arena for industrial workspaces) project shall provide the industry with an easy-to-use, cost-effective and interactive 3D environment, in other words, a digital twin of the factory shall be created. The environment can be used for development, workplace design, skills development and ergonomic analysis and will be able to include thousands of users.
By building the factory digitally, the industry will be able to do the work in the virtual factory and then translate it into reality when the factories are put into operation.
We are PLENUM
PLENUM consists of researchers and method developers in XR and interaction design, factory/workplace design and ergonomics/manikin development. But also from end users and software developers for future scale-up/commercialization, in order to achieve industrial benefit early in development.
Project activities
- Gather requirements specifications from industry and practitioners together with experts
- Develop functions for XR environments, upskilling/reskilling for multiple simultaneous users in a digital industrial platform for analysis and design of workplaces and factories
- Develop domain-specific implementations in parallel for factory/workplace design as well as ergonomic assessments to enable interaction/multiple users in the same 3D environment
- Testing/validation in at least five real factory environments involving personnel of end-user companies with strong industry interaction, but also actors outside the consortium as we intend to validate during the project the solutions for rapid ramp-up in industry
- Fine-tuning and validation including dissemination of results to demonstrate the solutions to external stakeholders at exhibitions, invited demonstrations and other dissemination of results.
Create efficient factories
PLENUM enables better and more efficient factories in terms of economic performance with less emissions and more human-centered workplace design. PLENUM also enables inclusive design for all staff as well as efficient industrial 3D development environment, significantly reducing the need for travel as factories can be visited online.
The project is coordinated by: Chalmers University of Technology AB
Publications
2025
Empathic Computing
2025. Article.
https://doi.org/10.70401/ec.2025.0001
2024
Sustainable Production through Advanced Manufacturing, Intelligent Automation and Work Integrated Learning: Proceedings of the 11th Swedish Production Symposium (SPS2024)
2024. Conference paper.
https://doi.org/10.3233/ATDE240178
Sustainable Production through Advanced Manufacturing, Intelligent Automation and Work Integrated Learning: Proceedings of the 11th Swedish Production Symposium (SPS2024)
2024. Conference paper.
https://doi.org/10.3233/ATDE240182
2023
Advances in Digital Human Modeling: Proceedings of the 8th International Digital Human Modeling Symposium, 4-6 September 2023, Antwerp, Belgium
2023. Conference paper. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37848-5_5
