The EREMI team aims to develop and validate together an advanced higher education program, incl. Life Long Learning, on the interdisciplinary topic of resource efficiency in manufacturing industries, as well as the overall system optimization of low or not digitalized physical infrastructure by applying IoT technologies, towards sufficiently educated professionals on this economically, politically and technically crucial and highly relevant topic for the rapidly developing industries and economies of intensively economically and industrially transforming countries - Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Romania. These countries and their industries are currently experiencing an intensive development and the respective needed expertise profile for the needed engineers should be designed and built up in a sustainable way, by offering a respective higher education program. Currently Bulgaria, Romania and North Macedonia are facing a serious challenge in the higher and adult education and requalification levels, crucial for the success in the current reindustrialization situations there. Bulgaria and in particular the geographical and economic region of Plovdiv are facing highly intensively this challenge and therefore are willing, by getting a qualified support by a relevant and experienced partner from Germany – HSO – the highest developed industrial economy in the EU – to develop a higher education program addressing the improvement of resource and in particular energy efficiency in industrial infrastructures by using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence as a tool for the virtualization of physical production facilities. This issue has a high environmental and energy transition relevance as well. Quite similar is the situation in Romania. North Macedonia has experienced in the recent years an intensive wave of establishment of production facilities of many internationally active companies and has the chance, in the sense of this trend and before becoming an EU member state, to prepare well its education system for the challenges of the intensive re-industrialization. In all three previously mentioned countries, the resource and in particular energy consumption dedicated to industrial manufacturing is keeping the highest rate compared to all other economy sectors. In order to address and reverse this trend by adequately educated professionals on the field, developing and implementing innovative higher education and technological trends, and being supported by an experienced partner from Germany, a country already experienced this step of its industrial development in its younger past, the EREMI team will develop higher education content and particular B.Sc., M.Sc. and doctoral curricula on the field, and verify it at and/or supported by all 5 participating project partners. The program will be based on an interdisciplinary approach of academic and professional (also from suitable companies in the regions of the universities involved) trainers, as well as an intra-educational-system, involving students from all three academic educational stages mentioned before. After having developed and verified the online based learning content and platform, based on those a curricula for a joint degree higher education program on the EREMI topic, focused on the target group of postgraduate students, will be developed by all participating project partners. Its accreditation at each of the participating universities will happen after the project end, due to the specifica in the time pleanning related to it - varies in the different countries. The contents of the EREMI education program will underlay the open source rules and be publicly online accessible for all European relevant stakeholders and citizens through the EREMI website. It's publicity will be regularly reinforced by relevant events, social and public media publicaions, and most strongly through the involved volunteering partners from politics, R&D and for sure through all relevant platforms of ERASMUS+, the EC and such ones as LinkedIn. The final product of the project will be a free of charge online based interactive teaching/learning platform, built in Moodle, targeting university students and postgraduate professional, and serving relevant universities, pupils and companies for the fast and efficient professional education on this crucial topic for EU-wide industries, and especially to the industry in transformation, as in the region of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) due to the rapid industrialization trends and the lack of adequately educated engineers in this strategic industrial engineering and operations area. This product will be created, refined, validated and refined during the entire project runtime. A highly attractive publicly accessible project output, as one of the initial steps of its workflow, will be carried out - Foresight analysis on the Bulgarian and EU context of EREMI considering the current situation, challenges, and possible approcahes to address these.
The project team’s main objective was to develop and validate an advanced interdisciplinary higher education curriculum, which includes lifelong learning components. The curriculum focuses on enhancing resource efficiency in the manufacturing industry and optimising poorly or non-digitised industrial physical infrastructure systems. EREMI has effectively supported the future transition to Industry 5.0 by having set a higher education framework for preparing a common European pool of future experts. By having involved comprehensive foresight and technical research expertise and activities within the EREMI collaboration, the project team has designed a curriculum that equips students with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive in the evolving highly complex manufacturing landscape. By addressing the challenges posed by under-digitised infrastructure, the project has aimed to drive sustainable and innovative practices in manufacturing by introducing these through future experts. All five project partner organisations have been actively engaged in offering relevant educational content and framework for decentralised sustainable industrial development in regional and national contexts through capacity building at a local level.
Over the last few years, it has become clear that the digitisation of industry; the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data into it are a natural evolution towards a more efficient and sustainable way of manufacturing and building systems, as well as a faster and more seamless transition to Industry 5.0. This creates a need for new skills in almost every area of industry, due to the numerous emerging sectors. This new era of rapid development requires the implementation of lifelong academic learning strategies for engineering professionals to have a sufficiently skilled workforce to meet the challenges of the future. Nowadays, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Romania, three of the project partner countries, are precisely countries whose industries are experiencing extensive development and the relevant required interdisciplinary expertise for engineers is to be designed and built in a sustainable way - by offering a relevant interdisciplinary higher education program, based on sustainability. Since at these countries such a higher education model is missing, the EREMI team wished and achieved to set its solid foundation by performing the planned project activities.