With the Smart Factory Grids research programme funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Esslingen University of Applied Sciences is establishing a permanent interdisciplinary research network that will provide pioneering impetus, innovations and findings for the transformation of the manufacturing industry, particularly in the industrial location of Baden-Württemberg.

The research impulse pursues the vision of dynamically distributed production in the future, which is made up of several production facilities, each with specialised capabilities, in order to enable highly flexible production for small quantities with short set-up times.

The basis of this smart factory grid is a network of innovative autonomous, adaptive cyber-physical systems that ...

• act autonomously, coordinate and make decisions,
• evaluate their own state of health,
• are resilient to IT disruptions and IT attacks,
• enable a highly flexible material flow,
• flexibly manufacture complex components with a wide range of variants using additive manufacturing.