Introduction

The market environment is becoming more competitive, low labour costs in many parts of the world are attracting production away from Europe. Moreover, the economic recession that culminated in 2001 created an urgent need for the machine tool manufacturers to propose more cost-effective and environmentally friendly products.The overall objective of PROLIMA, is to provide European machine tools manufacturing SMEs with means to develop machines with minimum environmental impact and optimised global life cycle costs. The project will have a strong focus on cutting based machines tools, which includes grinding, milling and turning, but generic results could be further applied in other sectors. The PROLIMA project intends to have a substantial impact on 2 major phases of the life cycle of machine tools:

Design phase: development of an holistic method to design machine tools integrating information on Life Cycle Cost (LCC), on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and on Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS). The developed method will be implemented within a Decision Support System that will be used for design purposes.- Operation; use phase: to provide SMEs manufacturing / using machine tools with practical solutions adapted to their sector (LCA tool, environmental best practice manual,..) to improve in the short term the environmental impact and the cost-effectiveness of their machine tools.The PROLIMA project gathers 7 IAGs, 12 SMEs and 6 RTDs from 5 EU countries.

Companies