Home office, virtual collaboration and the use of online tools have received a boost from the Corona crisis. Many companies have quickly positioned themselves well on these topics, at least technically. But what about the production sector? How can manufactur-ing companies maintain their operations »by remote control« and what are viable exit strategies for a productive everyday life in the so-called New Normal?
New ways of development and collaboration in production
Under the title »re:work«, various session hosts will present impulses and practical ex-amples of solutions to these questions at the digital conference re:publica on the 7th of May on the platform re:publica.tv. At re:publica, the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO, which is working together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufactur-ing Engineering and Automation IPA on the project »FutureWork 360« to provide practi-cal examples of future production work in virtual lab tours, will be demonstrating not only how such a »lab twin« is technically feasible, but also how it can be used in the future. The session also focuses on the question of how and why production companies can and should completely digitalize and network their entire production cycle and pro-duction processes.
»The key challenge for the industry of the future is to consider production, product de-velopment, simulation and production development in an integrated, cross-domain and cross-industry way. The Fraunhofer IAO aims to create exactly this overarching perspec-tive and network experts from all these areas, supplemented by contributions from re-search and software development. With projects such as FutureWork 360, we are mak-ing the boundless exchange and transfer of knowledge across industries and fields possi-ble, « says Prof. Oliver Riedel, who, as head of the institute Fraunhofer IAO, promotes the topic of "Advanced Systems Engineering«, among other things, and presents new ways of development and collaboration in the production area throughout the online session.
Knowledge transfer via practical application examples
Dr. Stephan Wilhelm, expert for virtual environment at Fraunhofer IAO, explains which digital surveying technologies are available in practice, how they can be combined with existing software without media discontinuity and what added value a digital twin can bring for planning and product development, using the example of the virtual lab tour in the fully digitalized »Future Work Lab« - innovation laboratory for work, people and technology. Determining how findings from research are put into practice is one of the major goals of the research marketing project »FutureWork 360«, for which Yeama Bangali, a communications expert at Fraunhofer IAO, is responsible. She perceives the re:publica as a welcome opportunity to reach production managers right now and to be able to offer suitable solutions from research: »During the first online session of the pro-ject, we have already received positive feedback on the virtual lab tour. Re:publica is a great opportunity to gather further needs from the field and to develop and adapt ap-propriate solutions as the project progresses,« says Bangali.
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO