Virtual Product Creation

At the Virtual Product Creation division we are engaged in realizing the vision of a completely digitalized product creation process. Our aim is to design methods and tools so that later phases – from actual production and customer use to the range of associated services – can be factored in and planned for at a very early stage of the product lifecycle. Our consultancy and development services for industrial companies and public institutions range from independent technology surveys through analysis and optimization of digital processes and methods in product development to analysis and development of information standards, engineering applications and IT integration architectures. Our scenarios, tailored to your own situation and factoring in digital business and cooperative mechanisms, show you just where you stand and where you could actually be. We help you make the successful switch to a modern, fully digitized organization operating with high efficiency and maximum effectiveness.

The Sustainable Product Ecosystems department develops application-oriented solutions and approaches for the design of sustainable, circular and open product systems over the entire life cycle. In this context, the integration and data exchange of different domains and companies in the product ecosystem across several life cycle phases increasingly plays a central role. The existing data can be used to identify and develop respective design levers that reduce the complexity of products and ecosystems and enable the implementation of sustainability.

The department focuses on the following overarching goals:

• Ecological (and social) sustainability of products/systems/ecosystems in the development phase and along the life cycle.
• Establishment of circular economy
• Complexity reduction in product design and enabling of cross-domain working
• Realizing cross-enterprise collaboration and data continuity
• User-centric design as well as open access and applicability

Our core competencies:

• Design and development of sustainable product systems with agile and user centered approaches
• Digital twins for sustainability and circular economy
• Smart services and product ecosystems

Horizontal and vertical integration across the product lifecycle represents the central objective of the Intelligent Integration department. By aligning methods, processes, organizations, IT systems, as well as data and information models, we enable product lifecycle management. The networking of data in their semantics to a holistic ontology creates the basis of a comprehensive knowledge management, which has an extensive potential of support and automation through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The implementation of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approaches not only optimizes the development process, but also sets a base for semantic mapping of product information.

In order to design these innovative value creation environments and to realize them in industry, we are researching methods, concepts and technologies, with our core competencies including

• Product data and product lifecycle management
• Semantics and ontologies in the product lifecycle
• Application of artificial intelligence, analytics and machine learning in engineering
• Methodological analysis and design of the engineering environment
• MBSE methods and implementation in engineering environments, as well as co-simulation
• Methodical development of intelligent products and connected services

Modern, immersive technologies enable engineers and project teams to work collaboratively and efficiently on virtual and real products. We develop extended reality use cases based on user-centered design using state of the art technology by adapting requirements to user needs. In doing so, we create awareness of user behavior and context of use in order to realize intelligent assistance through context-relevant content in XR. For this purpose, we localize useful extended reality use cases, such as safeguarding methods, assistance systems, and training environments, and develop technical solutions for complex content within them, such as real-time interfaces to simulation environments. We combine these in a cross-thematic engineering metaverse and create easily manageable and demand-oriented access to them.

Our technologies bring the latest results of basic research in the form of profitable applications to our customers in industry:

• Technology benchmarking for the use of extended reality technologies
• Analysis of usage requirements and conducting usage studies
• Interfaces between XR and simulation software for real-time interaction of safeguarding methods
• Use of haptic devices to increase accuracy and immersion
• Implementation of assistance systems and training as well as maintenance environments in XR