FFD · Future Fashion Design\nReal-time, Accurate Fabric to Garment Virtual Prototyping in \nCollaborative Environments

The FFD project (targeting the Objective FoF-ICT-20111.7.4, focusing on target 7.4b and partly addressing 7.4c) aims to remove the main factors inhibiting the wide adoption of Virtual Prototyping (VP) by the Textile and Clothing companies (TCI), by drastically improving the speed of obtaining realistic garment simulations (development of massively parallel simulation techniques based on multi-core computing), the accuracy (simulation from yarn - to fabric - to garment, virtual garment close to real sample) and the functional integration aspects (Collaborative Prototyping offered as a SaaS platform). The new business model will offer drastic improvements in product development efficiency (reduced number of physical samples from 20% to 100%, time-to-market reduced by 3 weeks, collaboration between fabric and garment producers), services at low-cost (open, vendor independent and scalable platform), while opening new market opportunities to vendors of CAD and PDM/PLM systems. A just-right Consortium of 6 organisations: A leading European Institute (Fraunhofer-IGD) as Coordinator (will develop the massively parallel simulation engine), Assyst (apparel CAD) and ScotCad (fabric CAD) already offering state-of-the-art 3D VP solutions will work on improving simulation accuracy (from yarn to garment), ATC an ICT company with expertise in web integration based on the SOA model will develop a Collaborative Design and Prototyping platform (CDP), and two end-users (Piacenza- manufacturer of fine woollen fabrics and Consitex, the garment manufacturing member of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group) will integrate the innovative VP platform in their joint product development processes and will demonstrate/ evaluate its efficiency and impact. Various exploitation schemes will be adopted (new packaged VP fabric and garment solutions, integrated fabric-garment design and VP offer, joint exploitation of the Software as a Service CDP platform. The project duration is 36 months.