The Application Center Industrie 4.0-Industry-driven manufacturing, research and development

The industrial production of personalized goods is a great opportunity for manufacturing companies to strengthen their competitive position. This requires a very high degree of flexibility in the whole value-adding system. The massive digitization of production enables this flexibility in an economic way. There are manifold new solutions arising from the fields of the Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0. The strong connection of the physical, the service and the digital world can improve the quality of information required for planning, optimization and operation of manufacturing systems. Therefore, cyber-physical systems can be used in manufacturing to follow the vision of producing personalized goods on a large scale. The contribution at hand introduces the Application Center Industrie 4.0. This environment is a highly advanced platform for the cooperative research and development of innovative cyber-physical production systems between the IFF at the University of Stuttgart, the Fraunhofer IPA and cutting-edge manufacturing companies. The paper provides a detailed overview over the concept of the Application Center Industrie 4.0. The IT platform Virtual Fort Knox is concisely described as it serves as a backbone to realize a safe, secure and flexible way to integrate all relevant data and information sources and sinks. This includes humans, IT-Systems and technical components. This concept is then substantiated by the introduction of selected, prototypically implemented demonstrators that offer new ways of understanding and operating manufacturing systems. Afterwards the first example of a strategic cooperation between the Fraunhofer IPA and TRUMPF will be introduced. The paper closes with a summary and an outlook of future activities in the area of the Application Center Industrie 4.0. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license