Innovative learning environment for factory planning and improvement

The Learning Factory for advanced lndustrial Engineering will be in the first stage a training centre to promote knowledge, competence, and best practice in the field of a sustainable "Factory-Life-Cycle-Management" and in the second stage a test and research environment for required methods and instruments for a sustainable life cycle management. lt is based on results of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre SFB 467 - "Transformable Enterprise Structures for Multi-Variant Series Production". The "Stuttgart Enterprise Model" using a scalable approach with a basic model of process performance units and newly developed factory planning tools are being combined with approaches like "Factory as a Product" and "Factory-Life-Cycle-Management" and thus form the base of the Learning Factory for alE. 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) which were designed by Festo Didactic GmbH. Then the target of the training sessions and further required research are explained, i.e. to improve appreciation of the digital factory over the whole life cycle. And at the end the further development of the Learning Factory for alE is mentioned.