Digital Engineering

Today, digital methods, processes and IT tools are indispensable in the product life cycle, from design to recycling. They help to plan and control product development times, product quality and costs. At Fraunhofer IPK, we are realizing the vision of a complete digitization of product development and planning processes – so that you as a manufacturer or user can consider the later phases of your product's life cycle at an early stage.

Rethinking product development

Digital development of the future

The digital transformation will fundamentally change the development of products and factories: The use of artificial intelligence, novel virtual techniques, model-based solutions and new agile and collaborative forms of work require a rethinking and significant redesign of product development processes.

Digital twins

The use of digital master and prototyping models as well as their skilful correlation with operative data facilitate the long-awaited feedback-to-design. The development, representation and use of digital twins becomes a key technological competence for companies.

Information factory for PLM and IoT

Information systems meet information understanding: IoT and the constant expansion of the data and model world in the life cycle require the flexible and modular construction of information factories, which allow for a new form of semantic networking of all information objects.

Digital factory and inspection

The design of tomorrow's factories requires robust virtual planning and simulation in factory planning: Intelligent planning methods, secure virtual operation and novel haptic interactions in factory prototyping are the focus here.

Smart products and services

The intelligent linking of products, services and data streams determines the added value of tomorrow. To this end, classical engineering must be combined with an understanding of service and data analysis, giving rise to new tasks in the area of designing and validating corresponding holistically conceived products.

Model-based systems engineering

Wherever experts from several disciplines jointly develop products, heterogeneous development tools are used. To ensure the success of the development process, the integration of all systems involved is the be-all and end-all. We are developing methods and tools that support the joint work of different disciplines from the outset and integrate multidisciplinary development projects into a uniform process.