IMI at the Hannover Fair

From 13th of April until the 17th of April 2015, the Institute of Information Management in Engineering (IMI) has presented recent research results on the subject of "Industry 4.0" successfully at the Hannover fair. Prof. Dr. Johanna Wanka, Minister of Education and Research visited the KIT booth and tried out the research results directly herself.

Three research groups - Smart Immersive Environments, Knowledge Management and Lifecycle Engineering - presented themselves to a very large audience of visitors, special in focus was the topic Virtual Reality: Industry 4.0 experience in a virtual factory.

Industry 4.0 stands for a smart factory and places new demands on the IT infrastructure. The staff of the IMI developed an "Industry 4.0 Collaboration Lab" in collaboration with the Bechtle IT-system house Karlsruhe and the Solid Line AG, a efficient and flexible virtualization of equipment and production lines. Visitors were able to experience a virtual factory hall in a plant interactively at the KIT booth. The researchers' aim is to generate a virtual image of a plant at the push of a button. This can then be used for factory and process planning, production supervision and training. One of the biggest challenges is the automated preparation of large, heterogeneous amounts of data, its origin and meaning must be interpreted and processed in real time.