Ivan Marković

Ivan Marković is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the UNIZG-FER in 2008 and 2014, respectively. In 2018 he received the young scientists award “Vera Johanides” from the Croatian Academy of Engineering and in 2014, for outstanding doctoral dissertation, the Silver Plaque “Josip Lončar” faculty award. He was a visiting researcher at INRIA Rennes-Bretagne Atlantique, Rennes, France (Prof. François Chaumette).

His research interests include estimation theory with applications to autonomous mobile robotics.

Overview of R&I activities in Agile Manufacturing & Logistics

With the growing markets and internationalization of distribution chains, a growing need is emerging for ever more efficient and automatized production. Agility appears as a cornerstone for achieving sustainable competitiveness, especially in current unprecedented market instability coupled with complex customer requirements.

European Commission defines agile production as robotic production systems that operate quickly and adaptively in dynamically changing work contexts, implying that tasks will maintain or improve efficiency, accuracy and dependability over non-agile production. In addition, logistics can account for up to 50% of total manufacturing cost of an item, employing often 25% of employees, occupying 55% of all factory space, and taking 87% of the production time. Given that, efficient logistics also acts an important factor in reaching agile production.

While large manufacturers are aggressively investing in logistics automation to minimize the manufacturing costs, SMEs have often struggled to benefit from these new advanced technologies. In order to maintain sustainable competitiveness, transformation process of a conventional factory into a Smart Factory is needed, embracing the ‘so called’ Industry 4.0. (also referred to as the Smartization process).

In this talk we will show some agile manufacturing and logistics domain solutions with the emphasis on activities that Laboratory for Autonomous Systems and Mobile Robotics of the University of Zagreb Faculty of Eletrical Engineering and Computing has been involved in.