Learning factory for the manufacturing industry

Industrial Engineering (IE) integrates product development, marketing and sales, production technology, production and assembly in a factory. Today, construction and planning of products and processes mainly is based on division of labour. Digital Engineering leads to a new paradigm allowing the optimisation of processes before the actual physical construction through modelling, calculation and simulation. The "Learning Factory for advanced Industrial Engineering" in a first step will be - as a result of the transfer research project TFB059/1 - a training centre to promote knowledge, competence and the best practice in the field of a sustainable "production engineering": It is made for industrial engineers, from practice, i.e. technical managers, planners and designers of enterprise structures. In a second stage, a test and research environment for required methods and instruments for a sustainable life cycle management is planed. It is based on results of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre SFB 467 - "Transformable Enterprise Structures for Multi-Variant Series Production". One result is the "Stuttgart Enterprise Model" using a scalable approach with a basic model of process performance units, the potential of digital & virtual methods and tools as well as the possibility of learning in a real factory environment with iTRAME. Basic principles of transformable assembly and production sites will be tested and realised with iTRAME, both concerning physical planning and controlling. This paper aims at describing sustainable and innovative interaction of digital and virtual tools with the newly developed transformable modules of the real production systems "iTRAME" (from construction to disassembly). They were developed by Festo Didactic GmbH. The realisation of the applied research results concerning integration and synchronisation of the digital learning shell with the physical model factory is described as well. Then the overall learning concept as well as the target and content of the training sessions are explained. Finally further required research for the development of the Learning Factory is mentioned.