EREMI

Main objective of the project: Innovation

Project title: Education for Resource Efficency in Manufacturing Industries 

Project Acronym: EREMI

Project Start Date: 01-09-2020

Project End Date: 31-08-2023

Project Total Duration: 36 months

National Agency of the Applicant Organisation: BG01 Human Resource Development Centre (HRDC)

The EREMI team aims to develop and validate together an advanced higher education program, incl. Life Long Learning, on the interdisciplinary topic of resource efficiency inmanufacturing industries, as well as the overall system optimization of low or not digitalized physical infrastructure by applying IoT technologies, towards sufficiently educatedprofessionals on this economically, politically and technically crucial and highly relevant topic for the rapidly developing industries and economies of intensively economically andindustrially transforming countries – Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Romania. These countries and their industries are currently experiencing an intensive development and therespective needed expertise profile for the needed engineers should be designed and built up in a sustainable way, by offering a respective higher education program.Currently Bulgaria, Romania and North Macedonia are facing a serious challenge in the higher and adult education and requalification levels, crucial for the success in the currentreindustrialization situations there.

Bulgaria and in particular the geographical and economic region of Plovdiv are facing highly intensively this challenge and therefore are willing, by getting a qualified support by arelevant and experienced partner from Germany – HSO – the highest developed industrial economy in the EU – to develop a higher education program addressing the improvement ofresource and in particular energy efficiency in industrial infrastructures by using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence as a tool for the virtualization of physical production facilities. Thisissue has a high environmental and energy transition relevance as well.Quite similar is the situation in Romania.

North Macedonia has experienced in the recent years an intensive wave of establishment of production facilities of many internationally active companies and has the chance, in thesense of this trend and before becoming an EU member state, to prepare well its education system for the challenges of the intensive re-industrialization.In all three previously mentioned countries, the resource and in particular energy consumption dedicated to industrial manufacturing is keeping the highest rate compared to all othereconomy sectors. In order to address and reverse this trend by adequately educated professionals on the field, developing and implementing innovative higher education andtechnological trends, and being supported by an experienced partner from Germany, a country already experienced this step of its industrial development in its younger past, theEREMI team will develop higher education content and particular B.Sc., M.Sc. and doctoral curricula on the field, and verify it at and/or supported by all 5 participating project partners.

The program will be based on an interdisciplinary approach of academic and professional (also from suitable companies in the regions of the universities involved) trainers, as well asCall 2020 Round 1 KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practicesKA203 – Strategic Partnerships for higher educationForm ID: KA203-5591123B Deadline (Brussels Time) 2020-04-23 12:00:00EN 2 / 145an intra-educational-system, involving students from all three academic educational stages mentioned before.After having developed and verified the online based learning content and platform, based on those a curricula for a joint degree higher education program on the EREMI topic,focused on the target group of postgraduate students, will be developed by all participating project partners. Its accreditation at each of the participating universities will happen afterthe project end, due to the specifica in the time pleanning related to it – varies in the different countries.

The contents of the EREMI education program will underlay the open source rules and be publicly online accessible for all European relevant stakeholders and citizens through theEREMI website. It’s publicity will be regularly reinforced by relevant events, social and public media publicaions, and most strongly through the involved volunteering partners frompolitics, R&D and for sure through all relevant platforms of ERASMUS+, the EC and such ones as LinkedIn.The final product of the project will be a free of charge online based interactive teaching/learning platform, built in Moodle, targeting university students and postgraduate professional,and serving relevant universities, pupils and companies for the fast and efficient professional education on this crucial topic for EU-wide industries, and especially to the industry intransformation, as in the region of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) due to the rapid industrialization trends and the lack of adequately educated engineers in this strategic industrial engineering andoperations area. This product will be created, refined, validated and refined during the entire project runtime.A highly attractive publicly accessible project output, as one of the initial steps of its workflow, will be carried out – Foresight analysis on the Bulgarian and EU context of EREMIconsidering the current situation, challenges, and possible approcahes to address these.

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