Automation in Production and Plant Engineering

Is your company already responding to the current developments on the world market, and do you already address issues such as the digital transformation, Industrie 4.0, and predictive maintenance? The question is: How to use these innovations best, both for yourself and for your company, in order to generate market and competitive advantages?

The business area Automation of Fraunhofer IESE is the first point of contact for industrial manufacturing companies as well as for mechanical and plant engineers who want to further develop and optimize their production, technologies, processes, or products through software-based and digital innovations and align them to Industrie 4.0.

In numerous industry projects, our researchers have contributed and proven their expertise in the areas of Big Data, Processes, Architecture, Security, Safety, Requirements Engineering, and User Experience.

• Digitalization of the manufacturing processes to enable automated production
• Changeable production down to lot size 1
• Documentation of products and processes
• Shorter manufacturing times through optimized automation
• Cost reduction and quality increase in production and plant engineering
• Live streaming of manufacturing data
• Efficient process monitoring
• Increase in productivity
• Holistic overview of manufacturing (shop floor and office floor)
• Optimization of coordination and efficiency between IT and Manufacturing
• Virtual commissioning in mechanical and plant engineering

Get in touch with us. The experts from Fraunhofer IESE will develop the right solution with you.

At present, individuality is becoming increasingly important in our society. This change is also reflected in customers’ purchasing behavior. As a result, the need to be able to manufacture a wide variety of products and product variants with high efficiency is becoming more and more urgent. This requirement must also be reflected in the manufacturing processes. Although today’s manufacturing processes are very efficient, they are usually inflexible.

Changing the product type can therefore entail a great deal of effort and thus high costs. Potential customers that want to produce small lot sizes are faced with high unit costs, which may jeopardize the economic feasibility of their projects.

The transition to Industrie 4.0 promises to remedy this situation. By making production processes more flexible, the product type can be changed quickly and cost-effectively. This enables economically feasible manufacturing of orders even with lot size 1 and thereby increases competitiveness. In addition, the use of previously unused production process data enables completely new insights.

But how should this transition to Industrie 4.0 take place? It requires an efficient automation solution – in the form of software –that supports flexible workflows in a manufacturing process.

Fraunhofer IESE will develop a customized solution for you as well. Benefit from us as your partner on your way to Industrie 4.0.

• How to implement changeable production?
• How to develop Digital Twins and how to use them?
• How to establish open, highly networked automation systems that enable data access across several layers of the automation pyramid and even across companies?
• How to enable the use of state-of-the-art information technology concepts such as Big Data in automation?
• How can the paradigm change from embedded systems to cyber-physical systems take place?
• How to tap data sources for predictive maintenance?
• How to integrate devices from different manufacturers into a homogeneous communication system?

Are you dealing with these issues? Do you have further questions? Talk to us!
Below, we present a solution with the technology-independent middleware BaSys.