Continuing engineering education in changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing - Implications of problem-based learning in industrial practice

Increasingly volatile and complex manufacturing environments make the continuous development of engineering professionals’ knowledge and competences in changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing a major source of competitiveness in manufacturing companies. Enablers of this include modular and platform-based product and manufacturing system design, as well as industry 4.0 related technologies and digitalisation. Therefore, this paper focuses on Continuing Engineering Education (CEE) in changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing and investigates the implications of applying a university-industry collaborative approach to Problem-based Learning (PBL) for CEE in company-settings. The paper builds on a four-year CEE initiative from Swedish manufacturing industry and includes insights from implementing a CEE course in changeable manufacturing, which was designed based on PBL principles and run as an industry-university cooperation for four consecutive years. Implications addressed in the paper relates to 1) PBL as a suitable approach for CEE, 2) Research transfer to industry through PBL-based CEE, and 3) industry-university collaboration for CEE, which provides valuable insights on how to conduct successful CEE in knowledge fields that are fast evolving in order to enable fast industry transitions.