SFB 1574:  A Circular Factory for the Perpetual Product

• Subject Area: Mechanical and Industrial Engineering ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Materials Science and Engineering
• Term: since 2024
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 471687386

The SFB "Circular Factory" aims to enable integrated linear and circular production on an industrial scale. Its goal is to turn used products into new product generations, moving closer to the vision of a perpetual product. Innovative economic systems that decouple resource consumption from economic expansion are essential for achieving sustainable economic growth. The traditional linear economic approach of “take-make-use-dispose” is not a long-term solution, and circular production schemes provide an alternative. However, large-scale circular production is challenging for manufacturing companies, as current approaches require manual labour and only take place in small batches, mainly in low-wage countries. To increase the adoption of circular approaches, they must become more economically viable for relevant economic sectors. The eternal utilisation of used product substance may not be practically feasible, but this vision of a perpetual product is comparable to the Total Quality Management goal for "Zero Defects" and defines a clear aspiration. The proposed SFB project will explore scientific questions from various fields, including production science, product development, material science, human factors, robotics, computer science, and knowledge modelling. These questions involve generating new products from unique used products, managing multi-dimensional uncertainties, learning complex problem-solving strategies from humans and transferring them to automated production resources, implementing automation in a highly changeable, autonomous production system, and using uniform semantic modelling and resulting data and information to generate knowledge for decision support. The SFB is divided into three project areas: Area A is responsible for designing, modelling, and controlling the circular factory as a complete system through a highly interconnected product-production-co-design. Area B focuses on capturing and modelling the unique product instance and multimodal capturing of humans in object interactions. Finally, Area C aims to implement the autonomous and changeable production system. The development and setup of the circular factory on a laboratory scale is planned after the first funding period ends.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

• A01 - Integrated planning and control system for the circular factory (Project Heads Lanza, Gisela ;  Stricker, Nicole )
• A02 - Formal representation of adaptive production systems (Project Head Pfrommer, Julius )
• A03 - Knowledge technologies for multimodal and uncertain knowledge in the circular factory (Project Head Staab, Steffen )
• A04 - Integrated description, planning and modeling of the perpetual product (Project Heads Albers, Albert ;  Düser, Tobias )
• A05 - Functional model for the perpetual product (Project Heads Grauberger, Patric ;  Matthiesen, Sven )
• A06 - Modeling of system reliability (Project Head Matthiesen, Sven )
• B01 - Autonomous measurement strategies (Project Head Lanza, Gisela )
• B02 - Evaluation of material influences (Project Heads Dietrich, Stefan ;  Schulze, Volker )
• B03 - Information representation and management of product instances (Project Heads Beyerer, Jürgen ;  Heizmann, Michael )
• B04 - Perception of human (Project Heads Roitberg, Alina ;  Stiefelhagen, Rainer )
• B05 - Learning from human eye and gaze movement (Project Head Deml, Barbara )
• C01 - Transformer-Cell (Project Head Fleischer, Jürgen )
• C02 - Process combination of additive manufacturing and machining for the remanufacturing of unique products (Project Heads Schulze, Volker ;  Zanger, Frederik )
• C03 - Autonomous intralogistics system in the circular factory (Project Head Furmans, Kai )
• C04 - Learning of task models for manipulation tasks in the circular factory (Project Head Asfour, Tamim )
• C05 - Data- and simulation-driven transfer to the Transformer-Cell (Project Head Neumann, Gerhard )
• C06 - Lifelong Learning for Autonomous Versatile and Flexible Robotic Grasping System in the Circular Factory (Project Head Rayyes, Rania )
• INF - Data infrastructure for the circular factory (Project Heads Lanza, Gisela ;  Selzer, Michael ;  Staab, Steffen )
• S - Central service project (Project Head Fleischer, Jürgen )
• Z - Central administrative project (Project Head Lanza, Gisela )

• Applicant Institution: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
• Participating Institution: Fraunhofer-Institut für Optronik, Systemtechnik und Bildauswertung IOSB
• Participating University: Hochschule Aalen - Technik und Wirtschaft; Universität Stuttgart
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Gisela Lanza