Plenary Assembly and CoE-Conference 2017
On March 8 to 9, 2017, the employees met for the biannual internal meetings of the Cluster, the Plenary Assembly and the CoE-Conference at Manfred-Weck-Haus of WZL.
After the welcome by Cluster-spokesman Professor Dr. Christian Brecher (WZL), Managing Director Dr. Denis Özdemir gave an overview of the most important figures and events of the past half-year. Particularly the review of the two conferences of the Scientific and Industrial Advisory Board, which were held for the last time in the current funding phase, and the given feedback of the representatives from industry and science gave an important impetus to the new application for the Cluster under the title “Internet of Production”.
The future of the Cluster stood at the center of the Plenary Assembly: In the context of the meeting, Professor Brecher presented the proposal for the new Cluster of Excellence-phase, which shall be launched in 2019 under the title “Internet of Production”. Internet of Production, which is also the guiding theme of the AWK 2017 on May 18 to 19, 2017, intends to enable a real-time, secure information availability in the industry and to offer the greatest possible reliability with innovative data analysis processes. In the Cluster of Excellence, a sense of new beginning is clearly noticeable and manifests itself in the purposeful collaboration of the different institutes – an interdisciplinary cooperation which has already proven its worth in the expiring phase of the Cluster. Professor Brecher emphasized that the vision is based on “knowledge from a decade of research” and was confident since the research topic reflects the expertise and the strengths of the RWTH Aachen Production Technology Cluster. On the following Thursday, the scientists of the Cluster were updated during the biannual CoE-Conference. In more than 30 sessions, the project team members gave an overview of the latest developments in their subprojects in order to provide information on the current state of all Cluster-projects.