Project

"Implementing new collaboration scenarios in research and industry"

Project Proposal

Summary
Development of industry and the response of the higher technical education to the demands of the industry play an important role in defying 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 over the whole 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.

Taken into account all the above-mentioned necessities, many business processes do not take benefit from this new collaboration technology, although other technologies like FAX, E-mail, or telephone are well established. Unaware of its potential, collaboration technologies are often treated as a “visual telephone”, ignoring that there are much more perception channels, which can be addressed. Thus, all technologies remain unused, which support a collaboration in a team, resulting in large efforts and costs for team meeting with physical presence.

Introducing an IT-support for business 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 technology, the users often have acceptance problems. Exactly here the universities and other research 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 research institutes and with industry. By spreading the required knowledge they help to increase the overall acceptance and also 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 Romanian partner
• Preparation of a students’ exercise
• Preparation of a use case for industry
• Final report on the achieved results and outlook

The complete proposal can be found in the internal section.

Workshop at UTCN ( 23. -  28. May 2006)

The workshop took place at UTCN in Cluj. The goal was on one hand to get to know existing technologies and persons at UTCN, but also to fix the final roadmap with milestones and deliverables.

Arrival at Cluj-Napoca 

The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

During the workshop

In the lab

Wire-electro discharge machining

Rapid prototyping lab

Planning the installation for the collaboration set-up