DataPro

Nearly all industries and companies in the manufacturing sector in Hesse are confronted daily with the dynamic developments of digitalization in the production environment and their issues in connecting to modern IT infrastructures as well as the feasibility of new, digital business models. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular are often overwhelmed when it comes to tracking and implementing developments in the field of digitization, as they usually do not have the necessary expertise in-house.

The key to competitive production environments lies in end-to-end digitization and thus in data-driven production, which is characterized by the interlinking of the areas of production process, IT platform and digital services. The major hurdle facing SMEs in particular is the rapid and robust implementation of new, digital technologies.

The goal of the Platform dataPro project is to establish a digital and physical environment, unique in Germany, for the knowledge transfer of research results and development trends in the future field of data-driven production. The focus is on dovetailing the pillars of process, platform and service. The emerging lighthouse spans four locations (research labs and learning factories) of the Institute for Production Management, Technology and Machine Tools (PTW) and the Department of Data Processing in Design (DiK) at Darmstadt University of Technology (TUDa).

In platform dataPro, research results that currently exist in the form of individual solutions and industrial best-practice developments are dovetailed into a continuous process chain and merged into an open digital platform based on industry standards. Based on the production of a customer-specific product on standard industrial manufacturing machines, innovations in data-driven production can be efficiently experienced by visitors and workshop participants in a form established at PTW and DiK. By networking the locally separated learning and laboratory environments, current methods of IT security, cloud computing, edge computing and digital twins are presented, taking into account uniform communication standards. Furthermore, knowledge about state-of-the-art sensor and vision systems, innovative process monitoring as well as grey-box and AI-based analyses will be transferred. In addition, new, digital business models (so-called as-a-service models) will be integrated into the platform. By transferring the triad of process, platform and service, companies can experience incentives to increase competition, research institutions can receive impetus for new development activities and students can gain an early insight into future production environments.