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Company Core Technologies

System Design and Simulation

This research field focuses on system and component modeling, design and multi-physics simulation using AI. It addresses the CAD/CAM chain and digital twins for visualization testing, verification, and optimization in manufacturing, robotics and energy infrastructure.

What if we could design, test, and improve automation, manufacturing, and energy infrastructure before they were even built?

Traditional engineering cycles rely heavily on physical prototyping, leading to costly iterations, extended time-to-market and unforeseen operational bottlenecks. Modern industrial engineering requires moving beyond static CAD models toward dynamic, multi-domain simulation environments. By combining high-performance computing, real-time telemetry and spatial visualization, complex industrial architectures can be rigorously validated across their entire lifecycle before physical commissioning.

What matters are simulation, digital twins and industrial metaverse capabilities for faster, safer and more sustainable engineering.

A split image showing a colorful abstract 3D spiral design and a woman wearing a VR headset and holding motion controllers
A researcher sitting at a desk, thoughtfully working on a laptop

System Design and simulation covers geometric, mechanics, and functional modeling (CAD/CAM) with AI-enhanced workflows and generative design. It includes production design, virtual commissioning, as well as (multi-)physics, system, real-time and co-simulation. We also research simulation for the training of physical AI and synthetic data generation.

Our research addresses validation, verification, design collaboration, AR/VR visualization and lifecycle/digital twin management. Additionally, it encompasses automation engineering, electrical modeling and the design of distributed energy systems using multimodal simulation, uncertainty modeling, techno-economic optimization and agentic workflows.

For this Company Core Technology, we research applications that cover the enhancement of design, simulation and PLM tools alongside simulation, data, model and digital twin management platforms. Key areas include visualization, collaboration (e.g., Digital Twin Composer), automated 3D content creation and sustainability tools for product carbon footprint, circularity and lifecycle analysis with a digital twin.

Further topics are simulation-enhanced product and production design, virtual commissioning, CAD/CAM foundation model training, multi-modal energy system design and asset development for energy systems. Finally, our research addresses lifecycle and energy twins, circularity aspects of manufacturing, synchronization with real industrial systems and autonomous engineering.

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Publications

Explore our featured papers


SceneGenAgent: Precise industrial scene generation with coding agent

Published in: 2025 Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 17847–17875, Vienna, Austria
Xiao Xia, Dan Zhang, Zibo Liao, Zhenyu Hou, Tianrui Sun, Jing Li, Ling Fu, Yuxiao Dong

Generating 3D industrial scenes with LLMs is challenging due to strict requirements for precise measurements and spatial planning. To solve this, the authors introduce SceneGenAgent, an LLM agent that generates industrial scenes via C# code. It uses structured layout planning, verification and iterative refinement to satisfy exact quantitative needs, boosting LLM success rates up to 81.0%. Additionally, the authors release SceneInstruct, a dataset for fine-tuning open-source LLMs like Llama3.1-70B to approach GPT-4o performance within the framework. Code and data are publicly available.
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SiPhyR: An end-to-end learning-based optimization framework for dynamic grid reconfiguration

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid ( Volume: 16, Issue: 2, March 2025)
Rabab Haider, Anuradha Annaswamy, Biswadip Dey, Amit Chakraborty

Rising renewable energy, storage and electric vehicles require faster decision-making paradigms for distribution grids. This paper proposes SiPhyR, a physics-informed machine learning framework for end-to-end learning-based optimization of grid reconfiguration. SiPhyR optimizes topology and power flows to lower line losses, improve voltage profiles and boost renewable integration. To handle NP-hard binary decision variables, it uses a physics-informed rounding method within a differentiable framework. This allows SiPhyR to simultaneously optimize grid topology and dispatch while satisfying safety-critical constraints, as demonstrated on three canonical grids.
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Leveraging prosumer flexibility to mitigate grid congestion in future power distribution grids

Published in: Energies 2024
Tomaselli D., Most D., et al

The rising adoption of behind-the-meter (BTM) photovoltaic (PV) systems, electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps is causing distribution grid congestion. This paper evaluates BTM flexibility using a novel framework that combines a rolling horizon optimal power flow with a piecewise linear cost function to address this issue without costly upgrades. When tested on a grid model of Schutterwald, Germany, the results showed that self-consumption BTM storage resolved all feed-in violations but only 35% of load violations. However, proactively controlling storage charging and discharging effectively resolves the remaining load violations, even in nearly saturated grids.
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Neural differential equations with integrated control for chemical process modeling

Published in: 2025 IEEE 32nd International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data and Analytics Workshop (HiPCW)
Sumeet Rodiya, Ved Vartak, Kunal Bahuguna, Subhajit Sanfui, Ramsatish Kaluri

Neural differential equations are powerful for chemical process simulation, but their application to controlled chemical processes remains relatively unexplored. This paper evaluates neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) and neural controlled differential equations (NCDEs) for modeling a batched bioreactor system with explicit control integration. The authors develop a modified NODE framework containing control inputs and study NCDEs, which incorporate continuous control paths using spline interpolation. Implemented in Diffrax for efficient GPU acceleration, the frameworks demonstrate that NCDEs achieve superior predictive accuracy, whereas NODEs offer faster training times.
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Multi-agent framework leveraging knowledge graphs for virtual commissioning models

Published in: AUTOMATION 2026, Innovation trifft Anwendung (pp. 144-152). VDE
Max Diekmann; Jonas Nitzler; Jan Fischer; Hans-Juergen Pfisterer; Dirk Hartmann

Virtual commissioning models (VCMs) validate discrete manufacturing systems before deployment, but building them is labor-intensive due to fragmented data across tools like Siemens TIA Portal and NX MCD. To address this, the authors propose a knowledge-graph-grounded multi-agent framework. Deterministic tools extract and merge PLC and kinematic data into a unified graph database. A hierarchical agent architecture then assists with system understanding, script-based component generation and cross-domain signal mapping. Tested on a lab-scale manufacturing setup, the approach reduces manual interpretation effort and streamlines early VCM engineering.
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