"The North Africa (also called Maghreb) region, especially Morocco and Tunisia, correspond to Emerging Nations with unprecedented growth in industrial sectors, such as energy, manufacturing, information technology and telecommunications. Their economies have made impressive gains in industrial infrastructure, and both governments are adopting active and competitive strategies, both to promote a local industrial tissue, and to attract major industrial players. The industry is facing a historical turning point when considered on a global scale. To improve the attractiveness for investment and to meet market requirements of competitivity, in terms of performance, quality, and sustainability, both Morocco and Tunisia need to support industrialization. Therefore, both countries have adopted sustained strategies to support industrial companies to modernize their hardware, software and ""humanware"" infrastructures through embracing the industry 4.0 paradigm and technologies.This project particularly focuses on Production, Maintenance and Quality engineering processes, which represent key industrial business processes that particularly need attention, investment and improvement. The overall objective of this project is to contribute to strengthening the skills and training expertise of both Tunisian and Moroccan universities in the three targeted topics for inciting and assisting the Partner Countries (PC) transition to industry 4.0 era. Indeed, regarding the current performance of the PC industry, it seems to be considerably inefficient compared to those of EU countries. For that, there is a real need of alternative tools to develop new industrial process which will help Tunisian and Moroccan transition to the new industry 4.0 era. Besides, this project will be a great opportunity to build interesting and constructive collaboration between EU and both Tunisian and Moroccan universities to share knowledge and mutual expertise."

The manufacturing of large-scale parts needs the implementation of a holistic data management and integrated automation methodology to achieve the desired levels of precision using modular and more flexible equipment. Large-part manufacturing is characterized by the high customization required (built-customer specific). Also, manufacturing of complex large-scale parts involves a variety of subassemblies that must be manufactured and assembled. This high degree of personalization implies a great effort in the design and the posterior verification after manufacturing, to achieve high precision. On the other hand, this customised product-centric design requires an optimisation of the resources of the workshop –i.e. workers, machines, devices— for a responsive, reconfigurable and modular production, targeting the execution of key labour-intensive tasks by preserving industry-specific workers’ knowledge and skills (worker-centric approach). PENELOPE proposes a novel methodology linking product-centric data management and production planning and scheduling in a closed-loop digital pipeline for ensuring an accurate and precise manufacturability from the initial product design. PENELOPE is built over five pillars for developing a common methodology and vision deployed in four industrial-driven pilot lines in strategic manufacturing sectors (Oil&Gas, Shipbuilding, Aeronautics and Bus&Coach) and with potential replicability to other sectors. Moreover, it will be set a pan-European network of Didactic Factories and showrooms, providing training and upskilling capabilities enabling the workforce transition towards Industry 4.0 and general-purpose testbeds for assisting in the industry adoption. PENELOPE envision to highly-increase EU manufacturing sector competitiveness by increasing production performance, quality and accuracy while ensuring workers’ safety and resource efficiency.