The research team « Ambient Manufacturing Systems » (for which the French acronym is SYMPA “Systèmes de Production Ambiants”) is dedicated for studying and assessing the impact of Ambient technologies implementation at all the manufacturing system layers (from the business level to the shop floor ones).

Ambient means, for example, to equip the product with instrumentation based on RFID tags, Wireless Sensor Networks … That offers it storage, processing and communication capabilities leading to consider it as “an active object” in the entreprise control loops supporting its manufacturing, logistics … By this way, the product is synchronizing both the physical and informational flows, allowing to improve the company's reactivity by means of a adapted interoperability between management, supervision, execution, automation … applications.

To face with the challenge of Ambient Manufacturing, the SYMPA team is composed at about 25 permanent researchers and quite similar number of PhD students & Post-doc researchers. It is structured with 3 complementary projects:

- Product System: It is addressing mainly the design, modeling, product instrumentation .. in order to make the product active and interoperable with other products or its environment;

- Interoperating Systems: It is addressing issues related to product/product or product/system interoperability for the maintenance, the control, … of planning or manufacturing systems;