Through the combination of high-performance automation systems with smart industrial software, the machines in the factories of the future will basically run themselves. Supply chains will be automatically coordinated and the machines will receive the manufacturing information directly from the raw products.
In the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, the new technology and IT concepts are applied to the manufacturing environment by means of the "smart factory". A full, typical industrial production plant is recreated for the testing, development and expansion of innovative systems. New automation and control technology as well as operating and monitoring software are tried out on a demonstration system. With the help of these components, the smart factory reproduces the "real" manufacturing processes of various industrial branches and "manufactures" products such as colored water which serve as test objects for the perfection of new methods and processes. Siemens is contributing substantially to this research work.