Industrial Internet of Things/Digital Twin Testbed goes online in Berlin!

Driven by the current dynamics of globally connected intelligent production, the technological demonstration of the benefits of digital transformation in the entire value network is becoming increasingly strategic for consulting firms, system integrators, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and teaching and research institutions.

Together with the support of the Zhejiang Tsinghua Yangtze River Delta Research Institute of Tsinghua University, the School of Mechanical Engineering of Shanghai Institute of Technology as well as the Your Work Assistance (YWA) Cloud Platform developed at the Department of Data Processing in Engineering (DiK), one of the first Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) / Digital Twin Testbed Centers was initialized in Berlin (Adlershof) at the end of October 2021.

In addition to keynotes by the head of the institute of Tsinghua University, the president of the Shanghai Institute of Technology as well as the head of the department of DiK, experts from industry and research have supported the kick-off event with expert presentations in the field of Manufacturing Execution System (FORCAM GmbH, Hr. Lee), IT Security (DiK, Dr. Kern), Digital Transformation in SMEs (Mittelstand Digital Zentrum Darmstadt, Mr. Krückemeier), Smart Robotics (Tsinghua University, Prof. Liu) and Dynamic Simulation (Shanghai Institute of Technology, Prof. Lu).

During the kick-off event, Mr. Yübo Wang received a three-year lecturer invitation (Visiting Professor) from the School of Mechanical Engineering of Shanghai Institute of Technology.

Using IIoT and Digital Twin technologies, Industry 4.0 lectures will increasingly gain bidirectional interactions between the virtual and physical environments. A special unique selling point here is that worldwide lecturers and students, independent of location, not only start production orders in Germany in an online lecture in the web meeting, but also control each individual actuator of the industrial demo production facilities in the Berlin Testbed Center. The production process is both transmitted in the live-stream of process monitoring and displayed in the condition monitoring dashboard in near real-time.

Industrial collaborative robots, automated demo production lines or 3D printers at the DiK of the TU Darmstadt complete the ready-to-use selection of options for conveying knowledge of the benefits of globally networked production facilities of a value network. The geometric presentation as well as the functional representation of all networked industrial production facilities are broadly presented by means of Digital Twin technology. Thus, the applications on the Your Work Assistance Cloud Platform enable all students and lecturers to build individual dashboards, power business intelligence (BI) for small, variant lot size orders, due to the flexibilization of control down to the actuator level and model-based data-driven Digital Twins, in globally collaborative student projects and to operate them prototypically (also by means of DevOps) as well as to provide them as a service. For students or lecturers, the software and hardware extension is also offered to connect their private 3D printers or industrial production facilities.

In addition to the unique selling point in education and training, integrated development environment, globally operational networked demo production plants as well as Digital Twin applications in interaction with the methodological toolboxes of the„VDMA Leitfaden Industrie 4.0“ are offered as online/offline proof-of-concept of abstracted industrial use cases as well as hands-on experience in the development of own Industrie 4.0 implementations and business models for consulting firms, system integrators as well as companies.

At the hybrid event, the keynote lecture of Prof. Anderl in the online live-stream attracted more than 14400 viewers. We would like to thank all partners, experts and interested parties for their support!