“Digital Product Realization” is the key to efficient and sustainable product and production development. Extensive research in this area is therefore crucial for the competitiveness of the Swedish manufacturing industry. It opens possibilities for new research and innovations like no other disruptive trend today.
By taking on the challenges related to the broader area of digitalization, including research challenges such as:
- How to utilize extended amounts of data
- How to increase efficiency and accuracy in modeling, simulation and optimization of complex systems
- How to include more intelligence in products and production systems
- How to increase connectivity between systems
- How to allow for increased individualization in products and processes
This broadening aims at better meeting customers’ expressed or unexpressed demands, and producing products with higher quality and at a lower cost than earlier. The general approach can be described as a Sensing-Thinking-Acting process. The overall concept utilizes information about customers, individual parts, equipment etc. (Sensing) to optimize product and production concepts (Thinking) and adjust product and process parameters (Acting).
Research within the centre is essentially case-driven and cross-disciplinary with focus on the industrial process. Focusing on processes is a very efficient way to conduct applied research since real industrial needs are identified and solved at the same time as the need for new and sometimes deeper research is identified. The research procedure allows for both high-level, cross-disciplinary research as well as deep, intra-disciplinary research.
Research projects are initiated by new scientific approaches with the potential to drastically change the way the collaborating companies do business in the future. One important factor needed to succeed with this is the possibility to demonstrate the industrial potential of different approaches by using implementation cases. All the collaborating industrial partners approve of the centre’s use of real product data for analyses and tests.
Focus
Digital product and production development is a crucial enabler for future industrial competitiveness, growth and sustainable production. The ability to develop and verify complex assembled products and their production systems, without physical prototypes or testing, cuts development time and cost and contributes to reduced resource use. It also contributes to better working conditions.
Research themes
Research is carried out in three multi-disciplinary themes. In these themes we meet current challenges and gather the people most suited for each task, independent of which research group they belong to. In reality, it means that researchers from at least two groups of researchers always are included in each theme. Right now we are focusing on the following themes:
Research Groups
Four complementary research groups at Chalmers and Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre are gathered in the centre. In total there are 50 researchers (5 professors, 20 senior researchers and 25 PhD students) and approximately 70 engineers from industry who are working together on the vision of virtual product realization. From an international point of view, it is unusual to have such a large group of people sharing the same vision and focus.