Terms of use
What this application is — and what it is not
1. What this application is
The Volvo Forming Quality App is a research demonstrator built by Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) within the CiSMA project, in collaboration with Volvo Cars Olofström. It predicts sheet-metal forming quality from material and process data and presents the result as guidance to shop-floor roles.
It is provided for evaluation and research purposes. It is not a certified industrial control system, not a measuring instrument, and not a quality-assurance system in the sense of any standard or regulation.
2. Decision support — the human decides
Every output of this application is decision support, not an instruction. Traffic-light verdicts, cushion-force recommendations, sensitivity explanations, simulated fields and defect calls are model predictions carrying inherent uncertainty. The application deliberately shows a model grade and a confidence indicator alongside its predictions for this reason.
A qualified person must make the production decision. Nothing here removes the responsibility of the operator, technician, engineer or quality-control staff, or overrides the plant's own procedures, work instructions or safety rules. Do not use a prediction from this application as the sole basis for releasing, adjusting, accepting or rejecting production.
Predictions are valid only inside the range of the data each model was trained on. The application flags extrapolation and material drift where it can detect them, but the absence of a warning is not a guarantee of validity.
3. Access and acceptable use
Accounts are issued by an engineer-role administrator to named individuals for project purposes. Users must keep their credentials confidential, use only their own account, and enter information truthfully — records are attributed to the acting user and feed a quality data pool used for model retraining.
Users must not attempt to circumvent access controls, extract data beyond their role, disrupt the service, or upload unlawful or malicious content. Accounts may be deactivated at any time. Report suspected vulnerabilities privately as described in the project's security policy rather than publicly.
4. Data and confidentiality
Material certificates, test results, process settings and quality records entered into the application may be commercially confidential to the supplying steel maker or to Volvo Cars. Users must treat them accordingly and must not export or share them outside the project without authorisation. See the Data handling statement.
[REVIEW: confirm the ownership / permitted-use position for industrial data with Volvo Cars and the steel suppliers, and reference the CiSMA consortium agreement clause]
5. Availability, and no warranty
The application is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind — express or implied — including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy of predictions, or uninterrupted availability. It runs on a single research-grade deployment; it may be taken offline, redeployed, reset or changed without notice, and features described as “demo”, “draft” or “Phase 2” may be incomplete or replaced. There is no service-level commitment and no support obligation.
6. Liability
To the extent permitted by applicable law, BTH accepts no liability for damage arising from use of, or reliance on, this application — including production losses, scrapped or defective parts, tooling damage, business interruption, or lost profit.
[REVIEW: BTH legal to set the final liability wording and confirm what a Swedish public authority may lawfully disclaim, and to add the governing law and jurisdiction clause (expected: Swedish law)]
7. Intellectual property
The application, its models and its documentation are the work of BTH and its CiSMA partners. No licence is granted by access to the application. The source code is not publicly released. [REVIEW: confirm the IP and licensing position under the consortium agreement, and the attribution required for research outputs]
8. Payments
The application is a publicly funded research demonstrator. It is not sold, no fees are charged, and no payment details are collected — so there is no billing, subscription or refund arrangement. Should the software later be offered commercially, separate contractual terms (service agreement, data processing agreement, service levels and any refund arrangement) would be agreed in writing at that time.
9. Changes
These terms may change as the demonstrator develops. Last updated: 2026-07-29.
CiSMA UC1 research demonstrator — Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Volvo Cars Olofström. "Volvo" and "Volvo Cars" are trademarks of their respective owners; this application is operated by BTH, not by Volvo Cars.
Funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe grant agreement No. 101177798 (CiSMA). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.