Circular Factories

Description:

New, innovative economic systems are needed to decouple resource consumption from prosperity. There is no doubt that the traditional linear economic approach of "take-make-use-dispose" is no longer a recipe for success in the long term. Sustainable circular production patterns offer a solution to this problem.

The vision of the Collaborative Research Center 1574 "Circular Factory for the Perpetual Product" is to enable integrated linear and circular production on an industrial scale. This is intended to transfer used products into current product generations to come closer to the vision of the eternal product. In order to research the unknown processes and mechanisms, the Collaborative Research Center deals with scientific issues from the fields of production technology, product development and materials technology, ergonomics, robotics, computer science and knowledge modeling.

To achieve a circular factory for sustainable products, digital and interoperable representations of products and processes are required. One of our subproject, INF, provides a semantic platform that allows product and production knowledge to be stored in ontology-based knowledge graphs. However, existing semantic technologies lack the necessary capabilities to store and query measurement data, uncertain knowledge about products and product instances, and to utilize experiential knowledge effectively. The main goal of this subproject is to extend the existing technologies to save and query the knowledge of all unique products or objects in the form of semantic digital twins and considering the uncertain knowledge.

Running time: 01.04.2024 to 31.12.2027

Funding: DFG SFB1574
Project webpage: https://www.sfb1574.kit.edu/
DFG Webpage: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/471687386