On 1st July Bilbao hosted the annual general meeting of the FASyS project in which the main advances made by the project since it was started in September 2009 were presented. FASyS (Fábrica Absolutamente Segura y Saludable) (Absolutely Safe and Healthy Factory), is a project lasting 40 months with a budget of €23.3m, which forms part of the 18 big national strategic projects backed by the CDTI (Centre for Industrial Technological Development) within the CENIT programme 2009. A total of 13 companies and 14 research teams form part of the consortium that will carry out the whole development process for the project. Nextel S.A. is leading the consortium which has as its management bodies, Asociación Innovalia and Invema, the technological unit of the AFM, the Spanish Association of Machine Tool Manufacturers.

FASyS will enable a new generation of safety technologies and mechanisms to be implemented in the handling, machining and assembly industry, together with the generation of the reference model for excellence in the management of occupational health and safety, helping to improve companies’ levels of competitiveness.

Since it was started in September 2009, work has been carried out on establishing the FASyS model for excellence, which proposes a new focus on the design, start-up, operation and maintenance of a handling, assembly and machining factory. The distance between the current situation and the factory of the future has been surmised and the technology to be developed has been established within the framework of the project to break down that distance.

At the same time, the reference architecture has been developed for monitoring, communicating and managing information as part of an integrated risk management process to achieve a competitive and sustainable FASyS factory.

Moreover, after identifying 13 types of hazard situations in a handling and assembly factory, such as pinching, tripping, strained postures or repetitive movements, among others, the research teams taking part in the project are working on the development of 54 technological solutions to deal with them.