New business needs and conditions require fast, flexible, and highly customized global product and production development processes. New products, corresponding to new demands, must reach the market faster than before. Flexibility, effectiveness and efficiency are critical for success. Keys to meet these needs are:

• A more structured development process, characterized by cross-functional collaboration and concurrency, and supported by information management tools to allow for efficient information sharing, traceability and reuse.
• Well designed, robust product and production concepts that allow for easy-to-build products with high quality.
• Virtual verification of both product and production concepts, together with support for planning, load balancing and off-line programming.

The laboratory, consisting of totally nearly 40 researchers including 6 professors, conducts interdisciplinary research within the field of efficient product realization, focused on design, modelling, simulation, evaluation and verification of product and production concepts.