autoregion international ... Greater Region Mobility Innovation

16 To us at Fraunhofer, this means to regard the digitalization of products, production processes and their equipment as well as the associated IT systems and infrastruc- tures as integral parts. Each organization urgently needs its own roadmap to find its individual way to digitalizing its products and processes. To this end, we provide the opportunity of a long-term and target- ed cooperation of industrial partners with the Karlsruhe Smart Factory, an Initiative of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Covering a production area of 5,000 m² including a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, we design production processes that are not com- pletely understood yet while still delivering high-quality products to the market. In view of the challenges we face today such as market fluctuations or an ever-increasing number of product variants, today’s engi- neers cannot specify production process- es in each and every detail any more. In the past, they used to plan production process- es and derive production lines from those plans; then they planned them in detail, configured and assembled them and took them into operation. Today, most of these steps are carried out simultaneously. In Game changing innovations through cooperation By Dr.-Ing. Olaf Sauer, Automation business unit/Deputy Institute Director Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB), Karlsruhe Industry 4.0 is one of Germany’s most innovative initiatives – even though we are far from having reached the full potential of Industry 4.0 yet. To continue to use the opportunities for enterprises, we need the unbiased cooperation between production and IT experts for the benefit of our industrial basis in Europe. The large proportion of manu- facturing industry, above all, has been a major factor helping Germany master the crises of the past relatively well. In order to remain successful, however, we have to play an active part in shaping the digital transformation, which means to act rather than to react. Image: © IOSB Study on the car factory of the future published https://t1p.de/t2qy Karlsruher Forschungsfabrik https://t1p.de/knb6 Share Summary Kooperation sichert wettbewerbs- fähige Innovationen Von Dr.-Ing. Olaf Sauer, Geschäftsfeld Automatisierung/ Stellvertreter des Institutsleiters Fraunhofer Institut für Optronik, Systemtechnik und Bildauswertung (IOSB), Karlsruhe Mit Industrie 4.0 verfügt Deutschland über einen Exportschlager – aber die Möglichkeiten von Industrie 4.0 sind noch lange nicht ausgeschöpft. Um die Potenziale für Unternehmen weiter zu nutzen, brauchen wir die unvoreinge- nommene Zusammenarbeit zwischen Produktions- und Informatikexperten zumWohle unserer industriellen Basis in Deutschland. Gerade der hohe … Weiterlesen https://t1p.de/l3p6 cooperation with industrial partners, the Karlsruhe Smart Factory gets processes running that have not been specified com- pletely yet, while we still produce high-qual- ity products to get a new product to the market very quickly using a new process. To this end, we need massive (over-) instru- mentation of the processes using sensor technology, data-driven machine learning, the use of existing knowledge from pro- cess development and control technology to adapt process parameters in line based on up-to-date quality data, for instance. The Karlsruhe Smar t Factory provides an environment to industrial enterprises where their staff can cooperate with scien- tists and possibly other partners to be cre- ative without the constraints of their day-to- day business. In this way, they can actually design and develop new things, creating and optimizing a prototype – and even pro- ducing the first pre-serial parts at the test- ing areas of our shop floor. Specifically, this means that a new process is developed for a new product or two alternative processes are compared with each other; a manufac- turing process may be elevated to the next level of robust and economic (small-scale) series production or an existing series process may be improved by means of ma- chine learning. Preferably, this takes place in “Corporate Innovation Labs” at our Karlsruhe Research Factory, where companies can send their team members for a defined period of time. They are then called “Embedded scientists”, joining a team of Fraunhofer and/or KIT ex- perts to work on a project defined by their companies to develop innovative products, data-based services or new production processes. A steering group monitors the results at regular intervals, adding adapted or new tasks to the innovation process as necessary. The embedded scientists are given the opportunity to complete their PhD and return to their organizations afterwards, where they act as multipliers for new tech- nologies and models of cooperation. Dr.-Ing. Olaf Sauer