The ability to quickly adapt manufacturing systems to the frequently changing requirements (due to volatile customer demands, short product life cycles or changes in product variants) without sacrificing productivity is increasingly becoming a key success factor for manufacturing companies. Thereby, the reconfiguration processes might include mechanical, electrical, and software changes. In industrial practice, experts individually perform these reconfiguration processes without methodological support, which is time-consuming and highly error prone.

The XIRCON project, aims to provide a human-centered cognitive support system to speed up reconfiguration processes while minimizing the downtime of manufacturing systems. Combining three state of the art technologies, Digital Twins (DTs), eXtended Reality (XR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), XIRCON stands for eXtended Intelligence for Rapid Cognitive Reconfiguration.

DTs are promising to reduce the reconfiguration time of manufacturing systems by up to 58%. Combined with XR technology, DTs can be used more intuitively by human workers, visualizing and emulating digital information in a more accessible way. Thereby, it enables a faster analysis of the current state of the manufacturing, an on-the-fly emulation during the reconfiguration planning, a preview of the reconfiguration possibilities as well as their methodological validation. Finally, the XIRCON system is rounded off by AI to enable individualized reconfiguration possibilities and support their validation regarding the feasibility, KPIs, error prevention and manufacturing optimization.

During this project the required DT, XR and AI modules will be developed and evaluated in the context of a highly reconfigurable and innovative production system of value stream kinematics at the wbk (WSK- Wertstromkinematik).