Welcome to the Institute for Information Management in Engineering

Today more than ever, companies require fast and targeted innovation processes in order to produce technically and economically superior products. Market drivers are basic individual, social, and commercial trends, e.g. many customers perceive technical products increasingly on an emotional level. Other trends include changing demographic structures, higher environmental awareness and mobility, global interconnectedness of corporations and markets as well as the interdisciplinarity of modern technical products.  It has become one of the main challenges of the developing and manufacturing industry to master product and process complexity that has increased due to these global trends.

In cross-company and multicultural collaborations processes are to be realized through interconnected operation cycles where the development of interacting components is done spatially distributed but at the same time. The demand of product flexibility and versatility brings forward products with a multitude of models and options. Thus, a life-cycle oriented approach to products and their related service gains more and more importance.

Against this background, the effective and efficient management of information deriving from engineering processes is a decisive factor for the economic success. The term “information management” not only incorporates the operative and information processing work of engineers and managers but also all aspects of administering and organising these activities and processes. With respect to these challenges and requirements, the institute for information management in engineering (Institut für Informationsmanagement im Ingenieurwesen - IMI) compiles innovative, practice-oriented methodical and information technological solutions. With its work, IMI contributes to securing and expanding the competitiveness of research and industry.

The aim of our research and development work is the integration of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and CAx in process and system view supplemented by Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in order to create a high-end visualization that is part of modern working environments. This enables the interactive and immersive work with virtual prototypes during generation, validation, and optimization of development results and thus considerably adds to an effective and efficient collaboration of interdisciplinary teams. This also applies particularly to distributed product creation in cross-company and intercultural cooperations with other businesses.

In order to ensure immediate relevance for industry practices we greatly emphasize intensive collaboration with industrial enterprises to identify and define new subject areas, and to produce results. In addition to the participation of companies in national and international research projects further cooperation options are available, i.e. technology monitoring / screening, technology road-mapping, projects for company customized tasks as well as the supervision of student research projects and theses.