ICT applications for production

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Klaus-Dieter Thoben

High performing co-operations between independent companies with the aim to develop and to realise customised products are an important success factor for the competitiveness of the European industry. Due to immense political changes and global markets, new ways of co-operations, so called enterprise networks, can be seen in addition to the traditional supply chains. These enterprise networks are often formed to realise a single customers’ order and play an important role during the conceptual phase (product design) as well as during the realisation phase (production).

The research unit IKAP prepares, develops and realises methods and tools to support co-operative, inter-organisational enterprise networks. The research concentrates on efficient and effective collaborative design and production processes by applying innovative information and communication technologies (ICT). As focus can be seen the collaborative acting of enterprises during distributed design and production processes as well as during the late processes of the product life cycle such as the usage phase or the recycling phase.

The research results are integrated in the academic education of the next generation engineers (mechanical engineering, industrial management, systems engineering) at the University of Bremen. Another application field of the research results are industrial projects where innovative approaches are transferred to practical problems.

The research unit BIBA-IKAP is divided into three departments:

Intelligent ICT for co-operative production

Head of Department: Dipl.-Inform. Karl Hribernik 

The department “Intelligent ICT for co-operative production deals with the application of latest IC-technologies to develop and to implement co-operative networks. Within this context, the acquisition, provision and transformation of process and product related information is considered. This information is used to integrate real products with their digital representation, the product avatar, along the whole product life cycle.

By combing the latest communication technologies of the 3rd. and 4th. Generation with the latest positioning technologies (e.g. Galileo), new context and customer specific services can be realised along the whole product life cycle. These services can improve the competiveness of today’s enterprises.

By using the information triple identity-location-time, which is in principle available for all entities (resources, products etc.) in real time, new challenges can be seen when designing networked production and logistics systems.

Collaborative Business in Enterprise networks

Head of Department: Stefan Wiesner

The department collaborative business in Enterprise networks develops solutions for inter-organisational collaborations. The ability to integrate the most applicable partners in a short term collaboration is the core competence of potential partners in a dynamic network. Fields of interest are theoretical models, management concepts and the related ICT applications. Actual works are the in the areas of innovation, performance measurement, risk management and gaming to support the collaborative acting within networked organisations. The following research questions do structure the research work:

• How can different types of networks be configured according to the needs of a specific order?
• How can collaborative processes be designed and controlled?
• How can the ability of an enterprise to co-operate be measured and improved?

Integrated Process and Product Development

Head of Department: Dr.-Ing. Jan-Hendrik Ohlendorf

In the department „Integrated Process and Product Development“, information technology, analytical and empirical approaches are developed in the operational and production environment. The focus is on using product life cycle and environmental data to develop products and processes.

The fields of work are in the area of data mining, data-driven modelling as well as simulation for the improvement of customer-oriented product features. For this purpose, the necessary technical data illustrations of products and processes are developed and implemented for various fields of application. For example, existing AI and digitization approaches for industrial problems are adapted and prepared to integrate them into products and processes in the industrial environment with little effort. This adaption optimizes the energy efficiency and sustainability of products and processes.

Research is being conducted on the following topics:

• Modelling of product-related production processes with a focus on energy consumption
• Optimization of product and process parameters based on data-driven models to increase energy efficiency
• User-friendly provision of digitalization and AI methods for SMEs