Autor: Klaus-Dieter Thoben

Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in all sectors of the manufacturing industry. Companies are currently feeling the pressure of exorbitant energy prices very clearly, as well as the additional challenge of becoming CO2-neutral by 2045. With technologies from the field of machine learning (ML), innovative solutions can be developed that enable energy-efficient product manufacturing. In this way, ML-supported process control can make a decisive contribution to increasing the sustainability and competitiveness of a company. Decisive for ML-supported process control are the process- and raw material- dependent parameters, which are significantly responsible for the quality of the final product. The subject of this paper is a procedure for analyzing the complex relationships between the relevant influencing parameters for increasing energy efficiency in the manufacturing industry. (Only in German)

Digital twins are an important part of the Industry 4.0 idea. They mirror physical goods in the digital world and enhance them with additional capabilities and functions for analysis, forecasting and decisionmaking. This paper contributes to the classification and assessment of Digital Twins using a multidimensional maturity model. The presented method "DT-Assess" enables an application-specific assessment of Digital Twins. The developed maturity model consists of seven categories with a total of 31 characteristics to be evaluated. The systematic evaluation in five application scenarios allows, for the first time, a classification of the respective "digital twin" implementation or concept with the aim of identifying further development options and weaknesses.

This paper focuses on the investigation of current technical challenges in the context of industrial Virtual Reality (VR)-based training applications. This paper analyzes the current state of the art of industrial VR applications and provides a structured overview of the existing technical challenges. The identified challenges are discussed based on an industrial training scenario for the safe handling of electrical components.

Social media and the digitalisation of products allow a direct view into product and service use and customer experience. This Product Usage Information may be used systematically in product and service development. However, this requires its interoperability with relevant processes and IT systems. This paper presents an approach and its implementation as an IT platform which fulfils these prerequisites.

Whilst bIoTope should be understood as a highly flexible and dynamic ecosystem capable of seamlessly integrating arbitrary proprietary IoT platforms, it nevertheless builds upon several core components, which provide essential functionality. Those functionalities referenced in this article, are agnostic to other ecosystem-external systems. Inside of the ecosystem, a micro-service-architecture MSA approach is applied. Using O-MI for technical Interoperability and O-DF for syntactic and semantic interoperability are foundation pillars of the ecosystem.

The global community is currently experiencing many disasters requiring humanitarian aid not only for ethical reasons. This concerns natural disasters, but also man-made disasters such as war, terrorist attacks and nuclear disasters. Humanitarian aid is generally understood as a response to humanitarian emergencies, which goes beyond an initial support. Key elements of humanitarian aid are disaster management and humanitarian logistics, which operate as organizational principles in order to coordinate the supply of food, goods and emergency rescue workers. Due to the high dynamics and limited information transparency it is very difficult for the responsible persons to mitigate the plight as effectively as possible. A good method to develop effective disaster risk management strategies and decision-making mechanisms is the use of model-based planning and control approaches. This article discusses the current modeling challenges of humanitarian aid scenarios as well as the potential of ...