Design

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the additional challenges that events face in terms of appropriate crowd management. This paper is dedicated analyzing these challenges and existing approaches for the safe operation of events during pandemics. Based on this, an innovative framework is presented that uses intelligent crowd analysis and is applicable to an environment with volatile groups. In addition, the specifiv use case of trade fair events is considered in this framework.

Supported by an intelligent assistance system, the sustainability and digitalisation of the tideindependent Industriehafen Bremen can be increased. To guarantee port security, a constant level of the isolated harbour is essential. There is great potential for increasing energy efficiency if the lock naturally waters the harbour basin at times of high tide instead of employing a pump station. This contribution shows how artificial intelligence and innovative software systems were used to develop an assistance system to improve existing procedures without making extensive changes to the existing port infrastructure. (Only in German)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already an important part of business models and processes of many companies. In the future, AI systems will pro- foundly change our working environment. AI systems can develop completely new potential for companies in a wide variety of sectors and domains - especially in industry. Existing busi- ness models can be optimized along the value chain by optimizing production flows and processes or avoiding production downtimes with predictive maintenance. At the same time, AI systems can enable completely new business models and thus radically change existing mar- ket structures through new players. The AI economy of tomorrow will be more individual, more precise and more sustainable: Competitive value creation without AI will not be possible in many areas of industry.

Companies must increase their flexibility and enable high product customization and variety to meet market demands. In assembly, this requires a large number of special machines, which leads to high investments and space requirements. This paper presents a concept for a modular, reconfigurable assembly system that allows unrestricted connection of individual modules. It is shown how such a system can be located in the RAMI4.0 framework and fulfills changeability requirements on different production levels. (Only in German)

As early as 1997, Christian Lindner, now Germany's Minister of Finance, knew that crises and problems are "also just thorny opportunities. What at the time seemed more like a rhetorical, flowery battle cry from a brash young entrepreneur is, in essence, still a resilient, psychological fact today. Shocking strokes of fate or other drastic experiences often literally pull the rug out from under people - and change their perspective on their own lives. However, this forced change of perspective can also be a real opportunity for change for the better, if one has learned to deal with crises and to recognize and seize the opportunities hidden in them.

3D printing has established itself as a production process and has also found its way into the fashion industry. Individualised shoes can be 3D printed, but this poses significant challenges for automated quality control, as defects are rare. Autoencoders enable to train a system with defect-free data so that detected deviations from this state can be evaluated as defects. Our research shows a ROC AUC score of 0.87, proving that this method is suitable for anomaly detection in 3D-printed shoes.

This article aims to develop a model for the acceptance of RPA technologies based on the presentation of the state-of-the-art. The model is the basis of an empirical study on the acceptance of robot-assisted process automation (RPA) at a global technology company. The results of this study are presented in a corresponding publication "An Empirical Analysis of Technology Acceptance of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (Part 2)".

To show SMEs a way to identify changes at an early stage, the interactive situation awareness monitor developed by Fraunhofer IPK is used. This gives companies an individually structured overview about their environment and their company (e. g. order situation). The area of the corporate environment is currently being expanded to include the compa- ny-specific component of automatic recognition of context-related data in order to provide relevant information to a company automatically. For this purpose, a machine learning model is developed and trained using company-specific data sets. First- ly, it is necessary to create the data sets with relevant and irrelevant environment information. For that, the PESTEL analysis is applied in this paper. Further- more, advantages and disadvantages of the analy- sis for generating data sets are discussed.

An essential component of digital value creation is the innovation of digitally networked business models. By networking different actors and service bundles, new customer value can be created. However, this networking leads to increased complexity, which makes it difficult for tradition- al industrial companies in particular to exploit these opportunities in a meaningful way. For this reason, a system is presented that reduces com- plexity through modelling and makes it possible to compare the effort and benefits of business model ideas at an early stage.