Karl A. Hribernik

BIBA - Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH

In the realm of modern production and supply chains, efficient management of warehouse operations is essential for minimizing costs and enhancing customer satisfaction. This paper introduces an innovative approach designed to enhance the training of people with disabilities (PWDs) for tasks in smart warehouses, addressing the limitations inherent i...

Industry 4.0/5.0 workplaces are characterized by humans surrounded by massive digitalization, huge data generation, and data-driven management. However, this brings more complexity to the operators as they are exposed to vast amounts of data to reason about as well as to many situations of overwhelming cognitive load, leading them to potentially le...

The focus of this research is on advancements in HCAI systems for Industry 5.0. Such systems view AI as a critical component for augmenting human work, extending human capabilities within an industrial environment. Thus, they are key enablers for the “Operator 5.0” concept (Romero and Stahre, 2021; Gladysz et al., 2023). The aim of the Research Top...

Industry 4.0 is well-known nowadays and widely integrated into many production processes, but there is also a dark side of it. Many technical systems have become highly complex and are difficult to understand and maintain in detail. Familiarisation requires a certain amount of experience to understand the problems properly. Reconfiguration, adaptio...

Industrial maintenance strategies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to predict asset conditions and prescribe maintenance actions. The related maintenance software and human maintenance actors can form a hybrid-augmented intelligence system where each side benefits from and enhances the other side's intelligence. This system requires opt...

The mining industries need novel solutions to reduce production stoppages. Predictive maintenance solutions and especially the hardware components, cannot operate properly under such harsh conditions, as high concentration of dust and other chemical material may lead into fault sensor measurements. This study presents a solution for condition monit...

A Semantic Mediator was conceived in the CRC 637 (The Collaborative Research Centre 637 “Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes” focused on adaptive logistic processes including autonomous capabilities for the decentralised coordination of autonomous logistic objects in a heterarchical structure.) to tackle problems of interoperability of hetero...

Digital Twins are an important concept in the comprehensive digital representation of manufacturing assets, products, and other resources, comprising their design and configuration, state, and behaviour. Digital Twins provide information about and services based on their physical counterpart’s current condition, history and predicted future. They a...

Logistics 4.0 aims at enabling the sustainable satisfaction of customer demands with optimised costs of services with the use of emerging technologies, such as Internet of Things, streaming analytics, and optimised decision making. The availability of massive sensor data streams over time opens new perspectives for extracting meaningful and timely...

Augmented analytics is an emerging topic which deals with the enhancement of analytics with conversational interfaces as well as the exploitation of the human knowledge representation through intelligent digital assistants allowing users to easily interact with data and insights. The communication with the user by voice poses new challenges to the...

Why is it helpful to have a digital assistant? This question’s answer is not simple nor easy to find because artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, such as Alexa, Bixbi, or Siri, are amorphous compound technology and multi-purpose tools. Most of an assistant’s components provide unique benefits on their own. Mobility, voice interaction, the deleg...

The need to understand users and products is one of the cores for product success. There are many ways to reach this understanding,such as,interviews and consumer cocreation. This study put a focus on the application of product usage information (PUI). Although amount of product-related information is available in the middle of a product's life, pr...

Predictive maintenance systems are socio-technical systems where the interaction between maintenance personnel and the technical system is critical to achieving maintenance goals. Employees who use a predictive maintenance system should explore, modify, and verify their analysis and decision-making methods and rules. Conventional modes of interacti...

This study discusses a framework to support manufacturers in their maintenance activities via data-driven condition monitoring and advanced visualization techniques. Moreover, the framework proposes a user-friendly predictive maintenance approach by enabling the user to configure the analysis chains by himself. Apart from this approach, the framewo...

Testing systems are preliminary designed for specific use cases to validate the proper functional correctness of goods and complex products. Therefore, testing systems are highly focused on a specific functional purpose. The characteristic of a unique design in testing systems leads to high development and manufacturing costs of the testing system...

The heterogeneity of data in logistics processes is due to the use of different systems, standards and data repositories. The same information is codified differently making efforts to integrate data necessary. Information objects are typically used by different legacy systems and different standards may be applied in the global context of informat...

The basic concept of a digital twin as widely used mandates the existence of an original counterpart-most commonly dubbed as "real"-which is represented by the digital instance. Subsequently, this coexistence of the real and digital twins poses a continuous interoperability issue between the physical and digital worlds. While in theory, the mapping...

Voice-enabled assistants, such as Alexa and Google Assistant, are among the fastest-growing information technology applications. Their technological foundation matured over the last years and reached a point where new application areas in challenging business environments become a certainty. Maintenance in manufacturing is one of these areas. This...

Test processes of complex mechatronic systems became so heterogeneous that a direct knowledge transfer from test cases is necessary in the product lifecycle. In contrast to the necessity, the seamless access, exchange and direct usage of test case related knowledge is not feasible any longer considering the growth heterogeneity and corresponding ho...

The recent advancements in Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the increasing amount of sensing devices that collect and/or generate massive sensor data streams enhances the use of streaming analytics for providing timely and meaningful insights. The current paper proposes a framework for supporting streaming analytics in edge-cloud computation...

Steigende Abhängigkeiten in heutigen Wertschöpfungsketten und innovative Geschäftsmodelle lassen die organisatorische Abgrenzung produktbezogener Aufgaben und Leistungen zusehends verschwimmen. Dieser Beitrag versucht systematisch aufzuzeigen, wie Digitale Zwillinge im Kontext unternehmensübergreifender Geschäftsmodelle und Anwendungen gestaltet we...

div class="section abstract"> The main objective of testing is to evaluate the functionality, reliability, and operational safety of products. However, this objective makes testing a complex and expensive stage in the development process. From the perspective of an aircraft OEM, test cases are used to verify integration, system, and application lev...

By applying data analytics to product usage information (PUI) from combinations of different channels, companies can get a more complete picture of their products’ and services’ Mid-Of-Life. All data, which is gathered within the usage phase of a product and which relates to a more comprehensive understanding of the usability of the product itself,...

A critical factor that makes a product successful is its acceptance in its market. To achieve this goal, producers oftentimes collect and analyze feedback information from the market. This information allows them to get a deeper understanding about the product behaviors, customers, their usage patterns, future needs and expectations. The academic l...

The impact of Industry 4.0 will result in more automatic connected assembly lines, which are designed for manufacturing individual and customised products on demand. To enable this capability, the need for information-driven services were introduced, with the ambition that all physical, virtual and human entities shall be able to communicate among...

The computer-based representation of "things" in the real world is at the heart of today’s virtual engineering practices. Digital Twin (DT) is a term that receives significant attention in academia and business within this domain. Despite its appealing metaphorical strength, people use it to describe quite different applications with specific conce...

The clothing and textiles industry is facing intense challenges regarding shorter product lifecycles and increasing customer demands. The market expects new collection proposals up to every 15 days now instead of twice a year previously. The frequency of new collection design is especially demanding for small companies in the sector, who are under...

Since industrial maintenance is a key operation, modern manufacturing firms need to minimize maintenance losses and to improve their overall performance. In addition, emerging information technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT), cyber-physical systems, proactive computing and big data analysis in the context of Industry 4.0 are able to en...

A successful B2B marketplace must ensure that suppliers and producers in a supply chain can find each other, communicate and negotiate in an effective way, while performing business processes. To this, we present an approach that involves two core ontology modules, e.g., the Catalogue Ontology and the Business Process Ontology, which can be extende...

The problems of creating lifecycle ontologies for enterprise interoperability are addressed in this paper. Enterprise interoperability and enterprise integration are essential components of enterprise engineering (EE). A few definitions and viewpoints on EE are examined in the first hand. An original discipline for EE is considered. A generalized o...

Maintenance is a key business function within manufacturing enterprises related to all of their processes and focuses not only on avoiding the equipment breakdown but also on improving business performance. In recent years, due to the Evolution of technology, products and machines have become more and more complex. Consequently, the costs of time-b...

Traditionally, a significant period of time passes before new technologies go from the phase of fundamental technology research and development to the phase of experimentation and focus on technology application research. With the successive realisation of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the readiness of many companies for the adoption of technologies w...

The purpose of real‐time predictive maintenance is the fast identification and classification of possible incipient faults and their locations. This chapter introduces the concept of complex event processing (CEP) in the field of predictive maintenance. This concept enables a surveillance of the system state in real‐time using complex event process...

This demonstrator provides a semantic search service for a business-to-business (B2B) platform. It bases on an ontology network that describes the furniture industry. Platform users typically do not know its internal structure. They cannot search through its resources quickly and unambiguously. Facet Search services often have pre-defined facets. T...

Produktnutzungsinformationen geben Aufschluss über den tatsächlichen Gebrauch eines individuellen Produktes. Sie werden in der Nutzungsphase des Produktlebenszyklus generiert, die Nutzung, Wartung und Service umfasst. Bislang war eine Sammlung dieser Informationen weitestgehend auf wartungs- und servicebezogenen Quellen beschränkt. Heute aber erlau...

Eine Zukunft, in der alles auf Basis von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien miteinander verbunden ist, verspricht das Internet der Dinge. Dass dabei ein einzelnes globales System die Grundlage für die nahtlose Kommunikation zwischen Dingen ist, scheint aus heutiger Sicht, auf Basis von vielfältigen heterogenen Sub-Systemen und anwendungss...

The development of a complex product like an aircraft, train or car is not accomplished by just one manufacturer but rather by a complete network of manufacturers. Within this network, parts are developed and integrated into a component, components are integrated into a system and systems are integrated into a product. During these parallel develop...

High-value, complex products such as aircraft are not produced by a single organization at a single production plant. Rather, a network of highly specialized suppliers collaborates with often geographically distributed OEM production plants focused on specific parts of the product. This means that a suitable predictive maintenance strategy needs to...

This chapter presents a short introduction to closed-loop, item-level product life cycle management (PLM). It then discusses the case studies utilizing product life cycle information and/or data. Based on these case studies, the chapter further elaborates the potential of sensorial materials in the context, with a focus on the scenario-specific opp...

In the design of both leisure as well as professional boats, the experience of the boat designers and builders traditionally play a central role. To reach the desired customer satisfaction especially with high powered vessels, which often are used for decades, the tendency of overengineering is imminent. This is mainly based on the lack of reliable...

Product designers thrive on designing products to fulfil various expectations and needs from customers. To understand the customer expectation and needs, it is crucial to have the information on customer feedback that is generated during product usage phase. For this purpose, social media has attracted strong interest, as increasing amount of infor...

A product's value is increasingly determined by the services supporting it. Complex Product-Service Systems (PSS) – combinations of services and products – are in demand. Product usage information (PUI), that is, information about how an individual product is used, is rapidly becoming a valuable asset to industry to help inform service offers throu...

The lifecycle of a product is managed not only through the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), but needs to integrate with product services into a Product Service System (PSS). The related activities are performed throughout the entire lifecycle and require sharing information among tools of the different product lifecycle phases. When extending co...

Fashion companies often face challenges in meeting the demand of consumers since often production plans have to be placed before exact knowledge of the demand is available. Since the industry is a highly consumer- and trend-oriented industry, predicting the customers demand is crucial for the company’s success. Nowadays, these customers have been e...

The information flow in logistics is covered by a growing set of systems and standards. To handle the increasing heterogeneity, the exchange of information rather than the exchange of data is favored because unlike data information contains a precise meaning. This precise meaning would reduce the false interpretation between stakeholders within inf...

Nowadays the relevance of Product-Service-Systems (PSS) is increasing. Providing customers with products and supporting services suiting the customer expectations becomes a key-factor for being successful in the market. Contemporarily, a huge amount of data such as usage-data from sensors or Product Embedded Information Devices as well as customer...

Lifecycle thinking is a concept that is used to express a holistic perspective on conventional and extended products, such as Product-Service Systems and Cyber-Physical Systems. Many authors of academic literature make use of this concept by defining or reusing product lifecycle models. Those models express how products are designed, produced, deli...

The vision of Digital Factories is “…to reduce the need for physical prototyping when designing future factories, and support the management of the entire lifecycle of products…” Gorecky in Session A: PLM digital factory simulation optimization for the smart factory, [3]. For that purpose the exchange of information over the boundaries of processes...

The producers of marine auxiliaries face the challenge, that they need to adapt their middle-of-life activities to the otherwise defined and often not well communicated schedules of the ships, which are carrying their products. This paper presents both the methodological approach to a solution and its prototypical implementation in a specific use c...

A product’s value is increasingly determined by the services supporting it. Complex Product-Service Systems (PSS) – combinations of services and products – are in demand. Product usage information (PUI), that is, information about how an individual product is used, is rapidly becoming a valuable asset to industry to help inform service offers throu...

A product’s value is increasingly determined by the services supporting it. Complex Product-Service Systems (PSS) – combinations of services and products – are in demand. Manufacturers therefore need to offer additional services and to quickly take customers’ expectations into consideration. Knowledge valuable for the design of products and support...

English version (German Version further down): Title: Cyber pysical production systems - Enhancement of productivity and flexibility by networking of intelligent systems in the factory. Within this contribution trends for the production in Germany are analyzed and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are identified as a promising approach to tackle future...

The vision of Digital Factories is to reduce the need for physical prototyping when designing future factories, and support the management of the entire lifecycle of products. For that purpose the exchange of information over the boundaries of processes and applications is a mandatory step to achieve the required interoperability. This paper propos...

Lifecycle thinking is a concept that is used to express a holistic perspective on conventional and extended products, such as Product-Service Systems and Cyber-Physical Systems. Many authors of academic literature make use of this concept by defining or reusing product lifecycle models. Those models express how products are designed, produced, deli...

Knowledge about the activities happening beyond the point of sale is valuable for product and product-service design. In the product design community, the importance of this knowledge is accepted for several years, for instance through concepts like participatory design, as well as the living lab movement. An extensive involvement of users, in orde...

In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling of logistic systems with an emphasis on model transformation. Due to the complexity of logistic systems, their models are bound to consist of many heterogeneous components on various descriptive levels from the requirement definition to the platform-specific implementation. To cover these phenomena...

Leisure boats are highly customizable products with a usable lifetime up to several decades. The design of boats is typically determined by the designers' experience of boat behavior and knowledge about user expectations. Personal knowledge and experiences inherently lack objectivity and completeness of facts received from other external sources. T...

Recent approaches for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) aim for the efficient utilization of the available product information. A reason for this is that the amount of information is growing, due to the increasing complexity of products, and concurrent, collaborative processes along the lifecycle. Additional information flows are continuously expl...

As business conditions change rapidly, the need for integrating business and technical systems calls for novel ICT frameworks and solutions to remain concurrent in highly competitive markets. A number of problems and issues arise in this regard. In this paper, four big challenges of enterprise Information systems (EIS) are defined and discussed: (1...

The middle of a product’s life is when the product is with the user. During the middle of life (MOL) phase, useful product information is created (usage information). In the past, research in engineering focused on the transformation of this information into engineering knowledge – for this purpose, demonstrators were developed and described in lit...

Manufacturers of complex, high-value consumer products are increasingly forced to think of ways to satisfy their customers’ needs, stand out from competition and access new revenue streams. One way to accomplish that is to utilise the potential of product service bundles, which allow customers to enjoy a more holistic experience of products. The ob...

In today’s mature markets, customers increasingly expect the highest quality of physical products and related services. The actual shift from a product perspective to an integrated perspective on product service systems brings the entire product lifecycle of individual products into focus. Accordingly, an emphasis has to be placed on how to activel...

While verification is an important and expensive task in the development of airborne systems, insights gained into the system under test are still very much treated in an isolated way. This means that the knowledge established in the testing of airborne systems in product development is currently not applied to e.g. repair or maintenance processes....

Today, development of physical products does not only reflect the notion of tangible objects, but rather those of individualized products with associated services; which bring more value to final customers than the pure physical objects without any accessories and services. Thanks to new achievements in ICT, all product stakeholders (e.g., manufact...

The current market situation demands manufacturers increase the flexibility, adaptability and efficiency of their production processes, from product design to manufacturing, and taking the entire product lifecycle into consideration. Digital Factories present a vision of future manufacturing in which digital continuity through production processes...

Closed-loop PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is an approach to facilitating closing information loops between the individual phases and processes of the product lifecycle. These systems are heterogeneous, decentral and distributed throughout the network and over multiple lifecycle stakeholders. Stakeholders, and thus IT systems, may enter or leav...

This paper presents an approach aiming to reduce the energy consumption during the processing of natural raw materials. Natural raw materials are processed with more energy than they actually need. This is due to uncertainties on material and energy flows and to a lack of process flexibility and inappropriate machine configuration. The proposed app...

Modular design process is a complicated process with multiple steps. From the system level, this paper regards the modular design process as a natural system and analyze it so as to improve the sustainability and intelligence of the modular design system and make it better adapt to the changes of the enterprises. Through analyzing the deficiencies...

User-centric design requires the application of different techniques to elicit user requirements. Many of these techniques deduct requirements from feedback information concerning a product’s actual use. Typical approaches are inquiry and observation of users. While most techniques collect subjective use information, novel techniques, such as produ...

Accepted by CIRP 24th Design Conference 2014. To be published by Procedia CIRP, Elsevier

This paper introduces an approach for seamless plug & play data integration in a novel urban logistics concept. The logistics concept is called ubiquitous logistics and contains an agent-based perspective on shared logistics resources. Each private and public vehicle participating in the concept, as well as parcels, features an intelligent agent th...

The research initiative “Industrie 4.0” (I4.0) of the high-tech strategy announced by the German government targets the deployment of a cyber-physical system (CPS) in production and logistics. Such CPS-based environments are characterized by an increasing number of heterogeneous intelligent autonomous and communicating artifacts tightly integrated...

Nowadays, a production and logistics chain consists of many companies. The establishment of a robust information flow consists of the exchange of diverse information between the companies and its corresponding heterogenous IT-systems. By changing suppliers and logistic partners, the interfaces between their IT-Systems have to be adapted. The adapti...