In the research area "Digitization" we are dealing with the challenges, possibilities, and requirements of digitization for plastics production/recycling. Here, the possibilities of acquiring data from machines and analyzing them for improving the production process as well as product quality are considered. However, these approaches must not be developed and applied without the people in production. Therefore an important focus is the integration of humans to support them in their tasks. In the research area "Digitization" we are dealing with the challenges, possibilities, and requirements of digitization for plastics production/recycling. Here, the possibilities of acquiring data from machines and analyzing them for improving the production process as well as product quality are considered. However, these approaches must not be developed and applied without the people in production. Therefore an important focus is the integration of humans to support them in their tasks.

The manufacturing industry is facing the challenges of increasingly volatile markets with large fluctuations in acceptance figures and ever shorter product life cycles. In order to produce cost-efficiently, a much higher flexibility and adaptability to these changes is required. A consistent modularization of production resources and a consistent networking within production as well as across company borders promises to support this adaptability.

As an open platform, the LIT Factory is intended to research, develop, demonstrate and teach the potential and technologies of digitization and to create cross-industry solutions for products and production.

• How can heterogeneous machines be efficiently integrated into a plant-wide data acquisition system?
• How can the access to machine data be controlled and which data is needed for production planning, optimization and quality assurance?
• How can people in production be prepared for digitization or what digital support do they need?
• How can digital product data be used to generate automated production processes and thus significantly reduce the time-to-production.
• How can a horizontal network spanning the supply chain be designed so that data can be used to improve production across company boundaries?

Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Alois Zoitl knows more about Digitization.