The global objective of RaRe2 project is to create a flexible and resilient Holistic Ecosystem Platform, enabled by the interaction among many European organizations cooperating in the fast reconfiguration of process chains, through collaborative systems and adaptable workforce upskilling. RaRe2 will help make the European manufacturing landscape sustainably robust to unexpected market change, sudden disruption, legal change, or every kind of crisis and changing scenario including climate and weather related. RaRe2 has set strategic and operational objectives, which include innovative digital solutions and knowledge about standards and methodologies, which can support the quickness in reconfiguration and certifications at early stages. RaRe2 will enable the generation of a green wave that will early detect an upcoming issue, alert the decision maker, quickly propose simulations about potential new destinations (adjacent reasonable sectors and products), new routes (how to produce it, with internal reconfiguration and supply chain involvement), the plan to put the change in place, the expected speed of each connected node of the new route, robustness. Key pillars: i) AI-based early detection of reconfiguration needs, from internal and external sources; ii) rapid adaptation of products, processes and supply chain to the changed situations; iii) empowering and upskilling humans, supporting decision makers to make fast and concrete decisions and quickly ramp up of the workforce. RaRe2 will be exploited to create a strong and reliable network of organizations interested in cooperating in rapid reconfiguration events, able to take into account social, market, legal, sustainability and economical factors. The consortium is based on 22 European partners, which will develop and validate the solution in four industrial pilots plus one value chain oriented demonstrator. The International Cooperation is guaranteed by a pilot which has the main headquarter in Japan.

Manual and automated production lines must evolve to “produce more and diverse with less”, however they need to address shortcomings such as - high product variants requiring tool level dexterity and resource level reconfigurability - lack of cognitive perception systems to allow autonomous reasoning and operation - absence of adaptable control to accurately handle a variety of workpieces and materials, and - inefficiency of planning systems in addressing holistically all hierarchical production levels. SMARTHANDLE will research technologies to address these needs and support European industry, by implementing a) intelligent, reconfigurable agents to provide dexterity in a range of handling applications, b) AI based reasoning enablers to optimize the flexibility potential of these agents and c) Higher-level planning and coordination mechanism to allow the successful and scalable deployment of such solutions in real life use cases. SMARTHANDLE is a research and innovation action (RIA) nevertheless, it acknowledges that such technologies can be meaningful only if they lead to solutions that address real life needs. Thus it has engaged 3 use cases from the consumer goods (MENICON-handling of deformable, delicate and high precision parts: contact lenses), Metal Industries (ALUMIL- packaging of large variable section materials: aluminum profiles) and automotive tier-1 suppliers (ABEE- disassembly of complex products: batteries) involving dexterous operations that are not possible to implement with the existing technologies. SSH aspects will be addressed, demonstrating benefits for workers by reducing their involvement in unsafe and unhealthy tasks, improving their working conditions when working in areas where the SMARTHANDLE reconfigurable solutions will operate.