Research projects

IMP explores new methods and tools for improving maintenance planning and execution in highly demanding and complex production systems by intuitively guiding, supervising and using optimised scheduling. This includes the following priorities: (1) detection and classification of maintenance tasks from the analysis of machine and operating data; (2) automatically deriving appropriate tasks and work instructions; (3) scheduling these tasks taking account of resources, constraints and objectives; (4) intuitively guiding workers using technologies such as augmented reality; (5) automated documentation and quality assurance by observation and interpretation the executed activities.

Currently, a personalized evacuation support system is not available. Many accidents have shown (e.g., fire accident at Düsseldorf airport) that individuals were moving in the wrong direction because of wrong or missing instructions. It is well-known, that people act in a specific way in stress situations. PERSEUS will be a computer system, which guides stressed human thought in evacuation scenarios that occur in different environments.

There is the need for a software product/system on the market which offers a management and controlling view of available data (production processes) and at the same time is able to make historical data available in real time. It should be able to calculate, analyze and graphically depict as many different data sources online as possible. The "zenon Analyzer" – the final result of the internal research project is a Dynamic Production Reporting solution which is set up around the SQL Server Reporting Services.

“ROFCO – Robust Facility Communication” addresses research & development for next generation in-building communication infrastructure. ROFCO aims to offer new products within the building automation area by providing an in-building communication infrastructure, which fulfills the requirements for future products and services, thereby guaranteeing the desired sustainability.

The objectives of the SimuProd project are the integration of simulation methods (discrete event simulation) and tools (Matlab SimEvents, arena, etc.) in systems for planning, control and visualization of production (SCADA) and the development of strategies for use in maintenance, troubleshooting and optimization.

Following a previous project called LineMod, the research project LineMet was focused on developing the foundation for model-based analysis tools which should significantly improve the causes of the efficiency losses across packaging lines. The algorithms for increased diagnostic quality, the coverage of wider use cases, the data consistency and the visualization and presentation of the results were important research areas. The goal is to represent a good basis for industry partners in developing software solutions for the Food & Beverage industry in the short and mid-term.

In order to reduce time and to simplify the engineering process of a Line Management System, the application is designed in a modular way. The core principle of the solution is the standardization of these modules and of their characteristics: the communication with the machinery – based on Weihenstephan Standards, the information flow for data processing and the way to present the information to end-users. The Automatic Engineering technology of the software zenon enables the creation of a Wizard application which simultaneously uses the mentioned standardization and allows user configuration and adaption to concrete production equipment. The Wizard generates functional Line Management Systems automatically. If required, the result can be further tuned, by using the zenon Development Environment.

By means of the extensive analysis of user interfaces, the goal was to use PERSEUD to provide research material for persuasive integration of usability know-how in development environments in order to research, prototypically implement and to evaluate.

zeMAC3 will help to plan and schedule maintenance tasks effectively and will assist to automatically choose the right personnel for the open tasks, following an algorithm, which takes the availability and the competence of the individual workers into account. The innovative approach of zeMAC3 is to gather metadata from an individual’s knowledge and competencies, their current location and tasks as well as information about the context of use, including the physical environment, the current overall production status and organizational and social preconditions.

IPEN is a research project to promote the interface between the electric power and communications network. It examines the impact of the (low) quality of the communication network of energy applications. Based on these findings, models are explored for the best possible picture of formally-specified communication requirements to the resources of a communication network.

The project under the motto "fun with technology" in collaboration with COPA-DATA, FH Salzburg and CONOVA was to attract young people especially girls to the theme of technology and promote the entry into a technical education. Through the early positioning of these companies in education, it creates an excellent bond and identification with the company and their products and services.

The focus of the project OTITOS lies in the development of test procedures according to the IEC 61850 standard, the implementation of tests based on TTCN-3 with the aim to evaluate its applicability for energy protocols, the implementation of a prototypical protocol stack and a comprehensive performance and security evaluation in a state-of-the-art testbed.

End customers already require the implementation of new operating concepts and the presentation or control on alternative devices. Not only different kinds of representation, but also the different types of communication should be implemented with the Smart Interface project, which can offer a new man / machine interaction concept so to speak.

The goal of SCADA GIS is a system architecture for technical and semantic coupling of sensor measurement data in the context of the research project – to define the outline criteria of space and context for integration into an intelligent (geo-) IT infrastructure – from the application areas of SCADA and GIS. Based on the architecture used with the company involved in the research project, a prototypical technical implementation is validated using a concrete application scenario.

The ontology-based technology implemented in zenon supports safe fluid routing in complex pipe systems. The scientific approach based on ontology-driven agents allows process automation at the next level, introducing semantics into automation systems. The structure of the equipment used for liquid transfers is modeled within the ontology and this model represents the knowledge base for the application of sophisticated routing algorithms in a functional module called PrOnto.