Symposium 2025: Process Industry

Manufacturing Excellence Under Pressure

With high operating costs, narrow margins, and strong global competition, manufacturers must make every asset count. Uptime, reliability, and consistent quality are essential to stay competitive.

Our vision-assisted condition monitoring for gearboxes combines real-time visual inspection with AI-enhanced vibration analysis to arrive at earlier and more precise fault detection algorithms. Highly relevant for companies relying on continuous drives and rotating machinery, in order to extend component life and reduce unplanned stops.

For applications that demand precise motion, such as laser cutting or X-Y gantries, our process quality tracking and correction solution uses machine vision and CAD models to predict and compensate for deviations, securing accuracy and throughput in critical operations.

Empowering People Through Digitalisation

As automation advances, human expertise remains crucial. The challenge is to empower operators with the right tools and reduce labour-intensive work.

Our Expert Knowledge Booth demonstrated how organisations can embed institutional knowledge into digital workflows, ensuring continuity, fewer errors, and faster onboarding.

The competence-aware training and instruction generation demonstrator supports faster knowledge transfer. Using AI, it extracts required competencies from digital work instructions and automatically generates personalised training materials. This helps operators perform confidently and ensures critical know-how remains accessible as teams evolve.

Providing support for operational decision-making, the AQUME framework bridges expert process knowledge and real-time factory data to accelerate root-cause analysis (RCA). Turning static risk assessments into dynamic decision tools, this helps operators identify process variations faster and supports continuous improvement.

Smarter and More Flexible Operations 

To stay competitive amid fluctuating demand and energy prices, manufacturers need agile systems that allocate resources efficiently.

Our Planning & Scheduling Booth demonstrated how self-learning algorithms can help companies dynamically adapt to ever-changing conditions. By continuously aligning production with real-time parameters - such as labour and material availability or energy prices - it enables optimised workflows, greater flexibility, and higher overall productivity.

Meanwhile, our Digital Twin for End-to-End Demand Forecasting helps companies anticipate demand shifts across their supply chain. By simulating full-system dynamics, it identifies true customer demand, prevents overproduction, and reduces waste - leading to leaner, more sustainable operations.

Sustainability and Circularity

Sustainability has become a defining factor for competitiveness. Companies must not only cut emissions and energy use but also recover valuable materials from mixed waste streams.

With our digital twin of a continuous production process, operators can simulate process parameters to optimise energy use, product quality, and production stability. This approach is particularly valuable in energy-intensive industries such as chemicals or materials processing.

The defect detection without manual annotation demo shows how synthetic data can train inspection systems enabling visual quality control without the tedious manual labelling effort. This also supports sustainability by enabling automated recognition and sorting of heterogeneous materials, facilitating the recovery of usable secondary raw materials.