The IfM will contribute to a new project to improve indoor air quality and health, 

developing virtual sensors and combining physical models, 3D building models, and hardware sensor data to estimate pollutants.

The institute is working across projects in connected factories and healthcare innovation, partnering with government, industry, catapults and academia.

DIAL started out as the Manufacturing Automation & Control Systems Group (MACSG) in late 1995 with three people...

The Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring programme is focused on the development of simple, low cost digital devices and systems that improve the effectiveness of operations of small manufacturing companies.

This term, the University has embarked on the weekly COVID-19 testing of all Cambridge students living in college accommodation. A group of IfM staff, students and alumni are handling the job.

New solutions for low-cost automation for SME manufacturers were demonstrated to project partners at the Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring meeting.

We were lucky to be joined on 30 Oct by Dr Leo Christodoulou of The Boeing Company, who talked to an engaged IfM audience about the exciting engineering challenges of aerospace manufacturing.

The UK Government has announced £5.4 million in funding for a new centre to champion the digital revolution in the built environment.

Professor Duncan McFarlane discusses the advances, challenges and questions that manufacturers need to think about when embarking on their IIoT journey.

Dr Ajith Parlikad's project to develop Smart Manufacturing technologies in India has been shortlisted for the 2017 Newton Prize.

Should we automate? Professor Duncan McFarlane gave a sell-out talk on the future of automation to Cambridge alumni.

The IfM is a partner in a £5 million research collaboration that is set to revolutionise the UK's internet infrastructure.

IfM's Professor Duncan McFarlane (Head of DIAL) and Ajith Parlikad (Head of Asset Management) have co-authored an ICE (Institution of Civil Engineers) Guidance Paper on how new technologies will transform the infrastructures of the future.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and droughts: when a natural disaster strikes, relief organisations react by providing medical treatment, food, water and shelter. However, in these difficult and chaotic circumstances mistakes are inevitably made and supply networks often prove to be insufficiently resilient.

IfM has just published a report, commissioned by BSI (British Standards Institute), which looks at the challenges for UK manufacturers of ‘going digital’ – and how standards and good practice can help the UK benefit from the digital revolution.

Wenrong Lu, doctoral researcher, presented DIAL’s latest work on data mining for inventory management at the 8th IFAC Conference on Manufacturing Modelling, Management and Control (MIM 2016).

Researchers from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory, Philip Woodall, Vaggelis Giannikas and Wenrong Lu, visited YH Global’s headquarters in June as part of the ITALI project.

Researchers from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory Raj Srinivasan and Ajith Parlikad had a new book, Decision-Making in Asset Management, published by the Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE).

Two IfM graduate students reap the rewards of their entrepreneurial approach to agri-tech.

Researchers?from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory?won the best paper award at the 2016 International Conference on Information Quality.?

Alena Puchkova, research associate in DIAL, participated in the AGIFORS Airline Operations Conference that was held on the 16-19 May 2016 in Seattle, USA.

Professor Duncan McFarlane talked about how we should be thinking about automation at a summit on collaborative innovation at London's Royal Festival Hall.

Dr Vaggelis Giannikas, research associate in the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory, has been awarded a Cambridge-PSL-French Embassy Fund to establish a new collaboration with Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University (PSL).

Researchers from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory, Dr Vaggelis Giannikas and Dr Alexandra Brintrup represented the Cambridge Auto-ID lab at the GS1 Global Forum in Brussels in February.

Tariq Masood and Brian Robertson from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory attended quarterly meeting of Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) - Advanced Manufacturing of Homes, Buildings and Infrastructure (AMHBI) which was held at Grundfos Pumps Ltd, Sunderland on 15th April 2016.

Dr Ajith Parlikad, Head of the IfM’s Asset Management Group, explains how effective asset management can deliver significant value both for manufacturers and for infrastructure owners and operators – and how his team is developing a ‘social network of things’ which has the potential to revolutionise the way in which organisations manage their assets.

Zhenglin Liang participated in The System Engineering and Management Science Conference which took place in Beijing from the 1st – 2nd April 2016.

Dr Alena Puchkova, research associate in the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory, presented a paper called "Balancing push and pull strategies within the production system" at the 7th IFAC Conference on Management and Control of Production and Logistics.

More than 50 manufacturing companies visited the IfM last week. A mix of SMEs and multinationals, they were all there to learn how automation can help grow their businesses, improve their productivity and create better working environments for their staff.

On 28th January DIAL hosted the Smart Products Through-Life workshop which was second in the series of three, which aims to establish collaboration and outline the research roadmap required to support smart products through-life.

A quarterly meeting of Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) – Advanced Manufacturing of Homes, Buildings and Infrastructure (AMHBI) was held at BRE, Watford on 22 January 2016 with a consortium dinner the night before. The meeting was jointly organised by Laing O’Rourke, BRE and University of Cambridge - DIAL and Engineering Design Centre (EDC).

DIAL's research associate Vaggelis Giannikas and PhD student Wernong Lu visited China during the Singles' Day festival in November as part of an ongoing research project between DIAL and YH Global.

Cambridge Auto-ID lab will be presented at the GS1 Global Forum by DIAL's researchers Vaggelis Giannikas and Alexandra Brintrup.

Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory group is currently engaged in scoping a research project to look at Enhanced Repair of Domestic Appliances.

DIAL's Torben Jess had a unique opportunity to work as an intern with Boeing Research and Technology in St Louis for three months.

The Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory (DIAL) at the IfM are working with companies to develop smart ways of using data to improve performance and increase resilience.

We are pleased to report that a quarterly meeting of Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) Consortium was held at Thorn Lighting, Spennymoor, Durham on 16th October 2015.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory (DIAL) – having started in 1995 as the Manufacturing Automation and Control Systems Group and briefly morphing into the Centre for Distributed Automation and Control or CDAC.

The reliability engineering community has been battling with the difficulty of modelling the complex behaviour of asset deterioration. One of the key research areas receiving increasing attention is to use mathematical models to capture the phenomenon of dependences among components within multi-component assets.

Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction held an industrial workshop on Asset Management at the Institute for Manufacturing on the 28th of September. The workshop brought together practitioners across different infrastructure sectors to discuss the emerging challenges in asset management, and to help the Centre set directions for future research.

The latest in a series of CSIC Future Technologies Workshops, Big Data – the Art of the Possible, attracted 50 leading professionals and academics from more than 30 organisations keen to discuss big data in the context of smart infrastructure and construction.

What would it take to enable a piece of infrastructure to take care of itself, asks Duncan McFarlane of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure?

Most of you have probably heard the Internet of Things, or the IoT, mentioned but have you ever wondered what it means and where it all began?

In July, researchers from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory were actively involved in the IEEE INDIN 2015 conference on Industrial Informatics.

We are pleased to report that a quarterly meeting of Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) was held at the Institute for Manufacturing on 17th July 2015.

Dr Alena Puchkova presented a paper titled "Towards Lean and Resilient Production" at the Symposium on Information Control in Manufacturing (INCOM 2015).

Researchers from the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory visited YH Global in China for a two-week field trip in June as part of the ITALI project.

CSIC’s Asset Management team based at the Institute for Manufacturing has won a prize for the Best Poster and Presentation at the Institute of Asset Management (IAM) Annual Conference 2015.

Expecting the Unexpected article by CSIC's Duncan McFarlane and Tariq Masood published in Infrastructure Intelligence.

On 14 May, the IfM held its annual Briefing Day – attended by more than 150 senior industrialists and policymakers who heard about the IfM’s latest research and the work it is doing with industry and government.

The UK generated over 200 million tons of waste in 2012 which comprised 14% from households. Of household waste, 2 million tons can be attributed to waste electrical and electronic equipment each year.

Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory (DIAL) at the Institute for Manufacturing is pleased to introduce a new research project in liaison with the Engineering Design Centre (EDC), aimed at advanced manufacturing of smart products for homes, buildings and infrastructure.

An Industrial Data Recommender System to Solve the Problem of Data Overload" at the European Conference on Information Systems.

In November 2015, the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory at the Institute for Manufacturing will host Sohoma 2015, an international workshop on Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing.

RedBite Solutions is a technology company that turns physical objects into smart objects by connecting them to the cloud. Any object can have it’s own digital profile – just like people do on social networks, which means you can connect with the things that you own, manage and use in a much more intelligent way.

Duncan McFarlane, Professor of Industrial Information Engineering and head of the IfM’s Distributed Information & Automation Laboratory (DIAL), and members of his research team have been working with Boeing since 2005, finding intelligent solutions to some challenging industrial problems.

More than 80 people from 50 companies and Cambridge University met to discuss lessons and insights on how best to manage collaborative research between academia and industry. 

A workshop around the theme of Infrastructure Futureproofing was held at the IfM as part of a collaboration with Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC).

IfM held a successful webinar outlining a new approach to quantifying the business value of high quality data and the risk to businesses of poor quality data.

Aircraft that work together to solve complicated mathematical problems and airports with more flexibly used runways could be the future of flying, according to studies by University of Cambridge engineers and their industrial and academic partners.

A major £2 million research programme has been launched to examine changes required by the engineering industry as it moves to provide more product-related services, rather than just the products themselves.

Traditional manufacturing systems are poorly suited to the highly competitive, globalised markets of today according to a new book co-authored by Duncan McFarlane, Professor of Service and Support Engineering at the IfM.

A one day Forum focused on automated identification technologies in the aerospace industry will take place in Cambridge on Wednesday 20 June.

The Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory (DIAL) has announced it is to begin a new two-year research project to develop asset information management strategies for complex engineering systems that deploys key emerging technologies.

The Centre for Distributed Automation and Control held a one-day workshop on 28th September.

The Cambridge Auto-ID Lab at Cambridge University and Auto-ID Lab Japan at Keio University have signed an academic partnership and research collaboration protocol.

Dr Duncan McFarlane from the Centre for Distributed Automation Control has been appointed to the new Royal Academy of Engineering Professorship in Service and Support Engineering.

Cambridge Auto ID Labs today announced the formation of a global partnership.

Senior Industrial Fellow at the IfM, Andy Shaw, has just been appointed Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

Over 20 year nine students from Chelmer Valley High School spent the day with the IfM.

A distinguished group of Taiwanese academics visited the Institute for Manufacturing to visit three key technology research centres.

Research to focus on advanced automation technologies for the manufacturing supply chain.

The Data Management Theme