Two Bayreuth Fraunhofer teams are involved in the 'SmartDe's@Work - Smart Devices in Production' consortium: the Business Informatics project group at Fraunhofer FIT and the Process Innovation group at Fraunhofer IPA. The project, which was launched in January 2017, has been awarded funding of over 750,000 euros by the Bavarian Research Foundation for the implementation of digital technologies in industrial manufacturing processes. The aim is to use smart devices such as smartphones, tablets, smart watches or VR and AR glasses in the production environment over the next two years.

To this end, the optimal combination of software and hardware components should support production processes through interactive and intuitive information processing - both in work preparation and during production. To achieve this, the Fraunhofer teams want to connect smart devices to existing production systems using a middleware platform. In this way, the project team wants to reduce the integration hurdles when using them and ensure transferability to a wide range of applications.

Production control independent of time and location

Smart devices enable production control independent of time and location, for example in the areas of order release, provision of operating data or rescheduling of production orders. This allows production processes to be digitally optimized, quality monitoring, control and assurance to be implemented using real-time data and the process flexibility required for Industry 4.0 to be achieved.

In addition to the two Fraunhofer project groups, the development partners CamLine and Vogler Engineering as well as the user companies Rehau, Bittner Werkzeugbau, BKW Kunststoff and Federnfabrik Dietz are also involved in the project. The aim is to jointly identify a wide range of challenges for the use of smart devices, develop suitable solution strategies and implement them as part of a demonstrator.