boostIT

"Knowledge based partnership for digital product development "

Development of industry and the response of the higher education to their demands play an important role in defining the right scenarios for implementing new collaborations in education, research, and industry. One important aspect in this context is the fact that solutions to given problems are not realized by one single person anymore, but within a networked team, spread all over the globe. This holds true for industry and for research institutes as well. This net-based collaboration is not only a domain of the so-called “global players”, but with an increasing amount also of small and medium enterprises, which could be part of a supplier network for instance.

The goal of the project is to set up a center for customer orientation and productivity that designs and delivers products, systems and services to global markets. The project is in particular targeted knowledge based partnership with small- and mid-sized enterprises (SME).

Companies with the constant need for more competitiveness have realized that it is not enough to reduce costs and to have a high level of expertise in special fields. Companies must also know how to use information technology efficiently throughout the entire product development process, including innovation process, product development and customer service. The Digital Product Development Center (DPDC) will provide this know-how, which also offers SMEs and engineering offices significant opportunities for growth on international markets.

The project strives to increase the diversity of the research activities related to the themes, as well as the quality of applied research.

Digital product development concentrates on technologies listed below as well as on applications for those technologies. A crucial objective is to use the technologies to intensify cooperation across educational and entrepreneurial boundaries.

• Tools for innovative management
• Tools and toolkits for the early stages of product development, concept design and problem-solving
• New ways of using engineering system file formats
• Applications for new modeling and simulation technologies: product simulation/real-time simulation
• Product control
• Management of product lifecycle information
• Standards in the digital product development process

Introducing an IT-support for digital product development processes in the field of mechanical engineering also results in a modification of those processes. Unaware of the benefits and being insecure about the application fields of the new technologies, the users often have acceptance problems. Thus, universities and other institutes are needed to intervene in order to improve the man-machine interfaces and to use and teach these new technologies within collaboration together with other institutes and with industry. By spreading the required knowledge they help to increase the overall acceptance and also to transfer the knowledge into industry.
Five major steps define the proposed project:
- Introduction of the technology and definition of an application
- Implementing collaboration technology at the Uzbek partner
- Preparation of teaching material for students
- Final report on the achieved results and outlook
The project team has developed a logical structure, in which each step is defined by an implementing step that is analyzed at a round table.

Within the proposed project, new collaboration technologies will be implemented in university and SMEs as well in order to spread the knowledge. In particular, the project focuses on digital product development applications and processes due to the large demand by the Uzbek.

The institutional partnership is between the following universities / institutes:

The project is funded by the Nationbal Science Foundation FNSNF.