EXC 2023:  Internet of Sustainable Production (IoSP)

• Subject Area: Production Technology ; Computer Science
• Term: since 2019
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390621612

Industrial developments in the 20th and 21st centuries aimed primarily at productivity gains through economies of scale, leading to low prices and overproduction, which in turn gave rise to significant environmental, economic, and social challenges. To address these challenges, the Cluster of Excellence (CoE) Internet of Sustainable Production (IoSP) enables a systematic transformation of industrial production into a system of sustainable circular value creation. Specifically, the CoE IoSP aims to achieve sustainable production in the form of a Value-Enhancing Circular Economy that shifts the focus from recovering raw materials and energy to purposefully renewing, industrially upgrading, and using products and machines for a significantly extended period of time. To this end, the CoE IoSP provides foundations for accessing industry and domain data repositories and supports data selection and aggregation for a wide range of evaluation, optimization, and decision-making algorithms. The CoE IoSP builds on the integrated production and IT infrastructure developed in the current CoE Internet of Production (IoP), which enables the provision of the required data and intelligence across all stages of the product life cycle, i.e., from the development, production, and usage cycles, via Digital Shadows. For the IoSP, we extend these foundations to create Digital Product Records for capturing and continuously updating comprehensive data on product composition, condition, and usage across the entire product life cycle. Digital Product Records provide the basis for optimizing decisions on when and how to reintegrate products from usage into development and production. We design industrialized Circular Upgrade Production through corresponding processes, new product modularity, technology enablers, production systems, and their orchestration within and beyond new production network structures. To enable optimized decisions for sustainable production, we develop novel, energy-efficient AI techniques that consider when data storage and sophisticated computations are worthwhile. The concepts and methods are integrated within new coordinated, distributed ecosystems that ensure secure cross-enterprise collaboration and data exchange. We have formed a consortium of renowned researchers from production engineering, production technology, materials science, computer science, data science, economics, and social sciences. With extensive expertise in various production domains and the foundations provided by the IoP, RWTH Aachen University provides a unique environment to shape the path toward a more sustainable production. The RWTH campus with its numerous industrial companies and cooperation networks ensures application-oriented validation and successful transfer into practice.

• DFG Programme: Clusters of Excellence (ExStra)
• Applicant Institution: Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
• Participating Institution: Forschungsinstitut für Rationalisierung e.V. (FIR); an der RWTH Aachen; Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik (FIT); Fraunhofer-Institut für Lasertechnik (ILT); Fraunhofer-Institut für Produktionstechnologie (IPT); Institut für Kunststoffverarbeitung (IKV); an der RWTH Aachen
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Wil van der Aalst; Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Brecher; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Verena Nitsch
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr.-Ing. Thomas Bergs; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Kirsten Bobzin; Professor Dr. Stefan Decker; Professorin Dr. Sandra Geisler; Professorin Dr. Kathrin Greiff; Professor Dr.-Ing. Thomas Gries; Professor Dr. Holger Hoos; Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Hopmann; Professor Dr. Constantin Leon Häfner; Professorin Dr. Julia Kowalski; Professor Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Krupp; Professorin Carmen Leicht-Scholten, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Saskia K. Nagel; Professor Dr. Frank Thomas Piller; Professor Dr. Bernhard Rumpe; Professor Dr.-Ing. Robert Heinrich Schmitt; Professor Dr.-Ing. Günther Schuh; Professor Dr. Sebastian Trimpe; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Heike Vallery; Professorin Dr. Sandra Venghaus; Professor Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle; Professorin Dr. Martina Ziefle