Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems

EMOTION

Empathic technical systems for resilient production

Montage einer Roboterhand und einer menschlichen Hand, die sich fast berühren, zwischen ihnen ein Lichtfunken
© Fraunhofer Gesellschaft

Task / problem

Resilience in industrial production: In resilient production systems, that is, systems that are capable of responding, learning and adapting, people, intelligent machines and products must work together synergistically and complement each other's competences. This creates resilience to disruptive change in a turbulent business environment. Such collaboration requires the mutual understanding and joint action of all actors involved, which transforms empathy into a crucial capability of resilient production systems.

The “EMOTION” project dedicates itself to the requirements associated with this: The Fraunhofer lead project aims to demonstrate for the first time how “empathic production systems” enable more efficient cooperation between actors in production and the transformation towards resilient value creation communities.

Solution approach and technical implementation

For this purpose, the project participants design a reference model, taking into account the interoperability and sovereignty of individual actors. This model will then be technically realised through the development of combined hardware and software solutions. The added value of empathic production systems will be demonstrated through industrial testing in the fields of application of assistance systems, maintenance and production planning and control. The target group includes users in the fields of plant, machine and vehicle construction as well as system manufacturers and system integrators within the digital economy.

Under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK and together with Fraunhofer Austria and four other Fraunhofer institutes, the Digital Public Services business unit of Fraunhofer FOKUS contributes its expertise in metadata ecosystems to the project. The business unit develops a metadata platform which efficiently scans and catalogues metadata from machines and presents them in a structured format. Such a metadata ecosystem enables all actors in the “empathic” human-machine system to find the data they require to be optimally equipped to make decisions. The basis for this is “piveau®”, a data management ecosystem developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS which provides tools for the complete processing chain of (meta-)data.

Fraunhofer lead projects

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is responding to the current challenges confronting German industry. With its lead projects, it sets strategic priorities in order to develop concrete solutions for the benefit of the business location Germany. The research topics are aligned to the requirements of the economy. The aim is to quickly convert original scientific ideas into marketable products. The involved Fraunhofer institutes bundle their competences and involve the industrial partners in the projects at an early stage.