The Scientific Technical Committee: Life Cycle Engineering and Assembly (STC A) had a meeting held on February 20 in Paris and a meeting hosted in Stockholm August 22.
The February STC LCE/A meeting was attended by 90 people and the Stockholm meeting had 97 attendees.
CIRP conferences and sponsored conferences under STC LCE/A:
CIRP Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) conferences
• 32nd LCE Conference, 2025, Manchester (Prof. Mativenga)
• 33rd LCE Conference, 2026, Kamakura, Japan (Prof. Umeda)
• 34th LCE Conference, 2027, Braunschweig, Germany (Prof. Herrmann)
• 35th LCE Conference, 2028, Linköping, Sweden (Prof. Sakao)
CIRP Conference on Assembly Technologies and Systems (CATS):
• 11th Conference on Assembly Technology and Systems, 2026, Hong Kong (Profs. Zheng & Wang)
• 12th Conference on Assembly Technology and Systems, 2028, Patras/Greece (Profs. Makris, Michalos & Chryssolouris)
Sponsored conferences:
• CIRPe 13th CIRP Global Web Conference 2025 (Prof. Nanya Li)
• 21st Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing (Prof. Dietrich)
• 13th Conference on Through-life Engineering Services 2026 (Prof. Erkoyuncu)
• CIRPe 14th CIRP Global Web Conference 2026 (Prof. May)
STC A Keynote Papers
The 2025 STC-A keynote was Wang et al.: Human-centric assembly in smart factories
Future keynote papers are:
• 2026 – Thiede et al.: Decarbonisation of Manufacturing towards Net Zero
• 2027 – Makris et al.: Humans, AI and robots for resilient assembly operations
Technical Presentations
Winter meeting (2025):
• Jürgen Fleischer: Disassembly of rare earth magnets from electric traction motors
• Angioletta Catalano: A model for process selection in hybrid manufacturing for minimizing environmental impact
• Nehika Mathur: Charting solar photovoltaic sustainability: An integrated model to characterize & quantify environmental & economic impacts for End-of-Use solar panels
• Sotiris Makris: Cognitive Exoskeletons: Harnessing AI for Enhanced Wearable Robotics in Manufacturing
• Peng Wang: Advanced Rotation-Equivariant Object Detection for Robotic Assembly
• Sebastian Schlund: Can Implicit Interaction improve Teaming in Human-Robot Collaboration?: Results of a User Study
• George Michalos: AI - based perception for automated assembly evaluation in Human–Robot Collaborative systems
• Sebastian Thiede: Digital solution towards human centred assembly workstations
The last five technical presentations were part of a moderated discussion on “Humans, AI and robots in future assembly” (Moderator: Sotiris Makris).
GA Meeting – Stockholm (2025)
• Eraldo da Silva: Abrasive processes towards manufacturing for sustainability—Progress and challenges
• Wen Li: Leveraging Remote Sensing Technology for Life Cycle Assessment and the Circular Economy
• Nehika Mathur: NIST’s efforts towards supply chain resilience of emerging technologies
• Tero Kaarlela: Digital twin and extended reality for teleoperation of the electric vehicle battery disassembly
• Zhiguo Zeng: Remaining useful life-aware trajectory planning for robot manipulators
• Sebastian Schlund: Biosignal-based stress reduction in assembly
• Robert Schmitt: Embodied AI Agents for Reconfiguring Robotic Task Sequences in Flexible Assembly Automation
• Tian Wang: A Foundation Model-based 3D Joint Tool-Part Affordance Grounding and Task-aware Trajectory Generation Approach for Precise Industrial Robot Tool-use Manipulation
• Annika Raatz: AI-Assisted Framework for CAD-to-ROS2 Robot Programming in Micro Assembly
Other business
Essays for CIRP Novel Topics in Production Engineering:
Vol. 1
• Urgo et al.: AI-based Pose Estimation of Human Operators in Manufacturing Environments
• Makris et al.: Seamless Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Applications
Vol. 2
• Ansari et al.: Technical Language Processing in Manufacturing Applications
Vol. 3
• Bukkapatnam et al.: Safety and Production Quality Assurance in Human-Centric Collaborative Manufacturing and Assembly Systems
• Liu et al.: Generative AI for human-centric assembly
Officers
The officers of STC LCE/A until 08/2025 were:
Chair: Prof. Yasushi Umeda
Vice-chair: Prof. Lihui Wang
Secretary: Prof. Sebastian Thiede
For further details on the activities of STC LCE/A please consult the minutes from the winter meeting in Paris and the GA meeting in Dublin.
Respectfully submitted by
Yasushi Umeda / Lihui Wang / Sebastian Thiede