IDEA-FOOT · IDEA-Foot: Innovative DEsign and mAnufacturing systems for small series production for European FOOTwear companies

The reference scenario for the IDEA-foot project is theEuropean SMEs working in the footwear industry and in particular in the market segment of classical and casual shoes. The global competition is asking for the reduction of Time to Market, increase of products diversification also with a small batch production while keeping a high fashion and quality content of the product. The actual design and production processes result to be not suitable for this small batch and variegated production. In particular the actual design and industrialization processes follow a serial model, in which the semifinished shoe model is necessary for the sequential development of the other shoe components to be assembled. Moreover the production process has an handicraft connotation: the operators program and feed manually the semiautomatic machineries for each batch of shoes. The aim of the project IDEA-foot are: • the introduction of a new method for the integrated design and production of the shoe, in which the key elements are the standardization of the shoe components and the transfer of the geometrical information from the design to the production process in a digital standard data format; • the development of a CAD software module to ease the design of components according to the standards; • the development of a CAM software which transfers the production parameters from the CAD models to the production machineries using a standard data format, which is another enabling technology just developed, and is able to integrate the machineries with the manipulation system; • the development of an automated production cell by enhancing the interfaces of existing machineries which are going to be modified in order to work in an integrated/synchronised way. An automatic manipulation system is going to be used for the handling of the semifinished shoes in order to automate while minimising the duration of these operations, which do not add any value to the product