Motivation

Environmental protection, digitalisation and new forms of mobility are driving change in the automotive and rail industries. The industry is currently facing a number of challenges: Electrification is leading to an increasing number of variants, while at the same time high customer requirements demand consistently high product quality. These demands and volatile supply chains are increasing the complexity of production processes. Increasing complexity makes it more difficult to analyse the causes of quality defects, which can occur at all stages of the product development process. As a result, short-term corrective actions are often taken without systematically addressing the root causes. There is a lack of tools for sharing knowledge across the value chain, making it much more difficult to identify the causes of defects. This hinders cross-process learning from previous problems.

Objectives

To address these challenges, the project aims to improve cross- company failure management through the targeted use of AI methods along the industrial value chain. Technologies from the Catena-X data ecosystem will be used. A guideline for the implementation of Catena-X will be developed and recommendations for action will be derived. The main innovation is a cross-value stream and cross-domain failure management process, complemented by AI-based data quality improvement, feature extraction and predictive analytics. The resulting software solutions will be tailored to specific industries and made widely applicable to enable sustainable improvements along the entire value chain.

Approaches

The benefits of the project are numerous: The application partners can improve their production processes and strengthen their competitiveness. The SMEs benefit from new experiences and use cases that they can gather for the development of their software applications, in order to use them profitably beyond the duration of the project. From a scientific point of view, the project makes an important contribution to the further development of AI in failure management and enables practical evaluation. In addition, the practical applications of the project will provide valuable insights for the Catena-X data ecosystem. The solutions developed will not only benefit the participants in the project. In the future, they should benefit all companies in the automotive industry.

Acknowledgement

This project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection. We thank you for the opportunity to work on this project.

Project sponsors

Consortium partners