Partner presentation:

The Chair of Virtual Product Development at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern is concerned with research and teaching on smart engineering approaches, i.e. processes, methods and IT tools for the engineering and management of smart, networked products and product service systems (PSS). Smart products or PSS are based on the Internet of Things and are also referred to as industry 4.0 products. Concepts for the design and use of virtual product twins in interaction with the respective real, physically tangible products play a central role along the entire product life cycle, from product development to product usage.

The research focus “Smart Systems Engineering” focuses on new methods and IT tools for model-based systems engineering (MBSE) for interdisciplinary modelling and validation of smart products and PSS. This includes the modeling and simulation of complex, interdisciplinary system models including their behavior in the very early phases of product development. Furthermore, various closed-loop approaches for the validation of system models in various subsequent development phases, which integrate both virtual and real prototypes of the respective system, are part of this research focus.

The research focus “Smart Product Lifecycle Management” focuses on the management and provision of product-related data along the entire life cycle of smart, networked products. A central aspect here is the integration of product data, which is distributed across several heterogeneous software systems, on the basis of semantic data modeling and data management methods that use a digitized engineering repository.

Furthermore, approaches and IT tools for the modeling and management of virtual product twins in interaction with their associated real product instances networked via the Internet of Things (IoT) are the focus of this research area. This includes the preparation and feedback of product usage data into product development.

The use of the latest visualization and interaction technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is directly linked to the above research topics.

Role in project:

The research objective of the Chair of Virtual Product Development within the project AKKORD is to provide processes, methods and tools for the creation of an integrated and federated data backend that enables data analysis in SMEs. The backend should be a building block of the reference toolbox and closely linked to other areas.

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