< First ADiWa Communications Meeting

Project Sponsors Participate in the Second ADiWa Consortia Meeting in Kaiserslautern

---

On June 22nd and 23rd, the second consortia meeting of the ADiWa (Alliance Digital Product Flow)public funded research project took place in Kaiserslautern. On the first day, spokesmen of the project sponsor BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and the project executing organization DLR (German Aerospace Center) participated to get an overview of the project status after one year of the project’s duration.

The first day of the second ADiWa consortia meeting focused on the project’s status. The status of the project coordination as well as all scenario and work packages was presented. On the second day of the consortia meeting, the exchange and collaboration was raised with work groups.

Within ADiWa, there are four application packages with exemplary scenarios in several branches:

• Logistics: door-to-door transport on behalf of airfreight
• Automation technology: service management and service products (installation, maintenance, and so on)
• Retail: digital self service store and import management
• Manufacturing: demand-side energy management (inspection and active control)

There are collective challenges within all four application packages which will be solved within this research project. Business processes related to real-world-events like traffic jams, law changes for equipment, delivery delays of promotion goods, and so on have to be adjusted. Nowadays, this event information is manually generated and tends to delay the system. Therefore, just a reactive instead of proactive action is possible. The shared process status is mapped in heterogeneous systems of several participants. Delayed status information and manual communication via phone or email are the results. There is no explicit knowledge source about dealing with exceptional cases or procedures. A decision-making assistant, which would help to quickly adapt processes if they are affected by real world events, is missing.

The approach to solve these challenges is based on the vision of the Internet of Things and Services. Processes and services will be flexibly composed and automated based on information history and status of, e.g., goods, equipment, and so on via the Internet of Things. The goal is to enable dynamic business processes, to provide support with a decision-making assistant, and to thus proactively react to complex real world events. For example, the execution of production processes would be controlled by the energy offer like regenerative energy sources and/or price levels.

Further, the work packages presented the business process management and integration, event processing, security, evaluation and architecture topics and showed the first integrated demos.

The cooperation of the three BMBF research projects ADiWa, Aletheia, and SemProM, under the “Digital Product Memory” innovation alliance umbrella  and the importance of such a collaboration was presented by the project lead. The interplay of the three projects is shown in the following graphic. The SemProM project brings in the basic information based on semantic product memory with the help of smart items like RFID. This is one of the information sources for gathering knowledge within the Aletheia project. Other information sources are, e.g., product databases, office documents, wikis, blogs, and online forums. The approach of ADiWa is the automated integration of all relevant information out of the Internet of Things and Services into the business processes and their flexible and proactive adaptation. The “digital enterprise”, with flexible Internet-based corporate networks, adaptive business models with low level entry for customers and high density of nearby real time information would be created for the corporate management.

 

The project sponsor gave a positive feedback regarding the project status of ADiWa. The next step will be the combination of the conception ideas out of the application packages towards a generic concept and prototype.

 

Participants at the consortia meeting

 

Positive feedback from the project sponsor

---