Events

SME 5.0 Future Cooperation Meeting

By Helmut Zsifkovits on Mar 16th, 2023

On 16th and 17th of March 2023 a remarkable meeting took place in Stellenbosch. Prof. Otto Petrovic visited Prof. Helmut Zsifkovits who was on a secondment at Stellenbosch University at that time. Otto is Professor of Information Systems and Management at the University of Graz, Austria, and also a well-known athlete will more than 50 national championship titles in javelin throw, high jump, shot put, hammer throw and triple jump. He improved the Austrian record in javelin throw six times and won the title of Vice World Champion of Masters.
Otto is still very active as a cyclist. He arrived from Cape Town by bike and continued for another 1000 km from the garden route back to Cape Town within the following week.
His ride is documented in a book published in October 2023.
Previous destinations of Otto’s bike tours include Bolivia, Chile, China, Siberia, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, and Japan.
Otto and Helmut had fruitful discussions about common projects and also met with the faculty of the Industrial Engineering Department at SU.
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SME 5.0 yearly reporting

By Yotsaphat Kittichotsatsawat on Mar 15th, 2023

• Meet Dr.-Ing. Manuel Woschank in order to consult about the SME 5.0 project.
• Visit the smart manufacturing and chair of industrial logistics laboratory of Montanuniversität
• Work on publications about the SME 5.0 project at the Montanuniversität laboratory based on the topic of “Improvement of coffee production performance via integrated lean and automated mechanization techniques”
• Work on publications about the SME 5.0 project at the Montanuniversität laboratory based on the topic of “Forecasting Arabica Coffee Yields by Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average and Machine Learning Approaches”
• Work on publications about the SME 5.0 project at the Montanuniversität laboratory based on the topic of” Development of product supply chain strategy using BMC and axiomatic design”
• Short video of the Interview MSCA Staff Exchange
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Lecture on “Digital supply chains and Industry 5.0”

By Helmut Zsifkovits on Feb 23rd, 2023

During his visit at Stellenbosch University in February 2023, Prof. Helmut Zsifkovits gave a lecture to the students in the course of Louis de Leuw. The presentation was titled was “Digital supply chains and Industry 5.0”. The focus of the lecture was on trends and challenges in supply chains, the evolution of industry, technology enablers and the path towards a digital supply chain. After the presentation, there was a lively discussion with the students.
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Attending academic conference

By Rungchat Chompu-inwai on Feb 16th, 2023

Rungchat Chompu-inwai and Trasapong Thaiupathump from Chiang Mai University attended the 12th International Conference on Industrial Technology and Management which was held in Cambridge, United Kingdom on the February 16-18, 2023. The article is awaiting publication in Scopus.

The article that was presented was "Applying Genetic Algorithm in ABC Analysis for Jewelry Raw Material Inventory Management". In this study, Genetic Algorithm was used in ABC Analysis for Jewelry Raw Material Inventory Management in the case study company which is a small jewelry company in Thailand. GA that accounts for multiple criteria in its fitness function evaluation was used in the classification process, in an attempt to find a solution that minimized the overall inventory cost of a gold tube inventory dataset belonging to a jewelry company in Thailand. The company under study needs these three groups to provide different inventory policies based on their importance.
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Secondment to Malta University

By Matteo De Marchi on Feb 13th, 2023

During the stay, two main endeavours has taken place:
• Preliminarily testing of the proposed Digital twin reference architecture, to implement and validate it and to eventually refine eventual inconsistencies.
• Explore the adoption of Augmented Reality as a technology to put in place a Human-Machine Interaction mode within the proposed architecture.

To achieve the first goal of the project, a mobile training unit has been employed as starting point for the development of the case study. On top of the existing mobile training unit, a small-sized collaborative robot and a desktop 3D printer have been mounted. Thanks to this arrangement, I was able to design an exemplary work-cycle that foresee the 3D printer to produce a component, and the robot to detach it from the printing plate and extract it from the printing chamber. This cycle could be repeated as a continuous cycle. The proposed architecture previously developed in cooperation with Prof Chag-Tsun Li has been deployed here for the first time in its simplest form. It proved its validity in the efficient orchestration of tasks, and it proved its flexibility after the inclusion of an Augmented Reality application as an entity of the overall ecosystem.
The collaboration led to the composition of a manuscript reporting the work done, in view of the inclusion of human being in Digital Twin applications, with an eye on the upcoming Industry 5.0 era. The article has been presented by Prof. Emmanuel Francalanza in the context of the 17th CIRP Conference on Intelligent Computation in Manufacturing Engineering, entitled “A Digital Twin for SMEs in the Context of Industry 5.0”.
The work done in the context of this secondment supports the development of DT technology withing SMEs by replicating a first use case that involves the inclusion of DT-oriented solutions, to simplify the sharing of data among heterogenous systems of physical and virtual entities. This represent a first step in the direction of standardized DT technology to be seamlessly adopted by SMEs, as well as from large industrial settings.
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Lecture on “Digital supply chains and Industry 5.0”

By Helmut Zsifkovits on Feb 6th, 2023

During his visit at Stellenbosch University in February 2023, Prof. Helmut Zsifkovits gave a lecture to the students in the course of Louis de Leuw. The presentation was titled was “Digital supply chains and Industry 5.0”. The focus of the lecture was on trends and challenges in supply chains, the evolution of industry, technology enablers and the path towards a digital supply chain. After the presentation, there was a lively discussion with the students.
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RESPIRE Y2 W2: SME resilience: sustainability and industry 5.0 (TSS)

By Chawis Boonmee on Feb 3rd, 2023

Guest lecturer in topic of Disaster management in SMEs, Lessons learned, case examples from Thailand
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Secondment at Deakin University

By Matteo De Marchi on Jan 5th, 2023

The Ph.D. Student of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano visited professor Chang-Tsun Li at the Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, in January 2023. The cooperation between the two aimed at investigating how Digital Twin systems are affected by cybersecurity threats, and how these can be avoided or mitigated. The two produced a manuscript entitled "Reference Architecture for Cyber Secure Industrial Digital Twin Applications" has been submitted to the Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing and is currently under revision.
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Presentation of the project results at the “4. Kärntner Logistiktag” of the “Bundesvereinigung Logistik Österreich“

By Manuel Woschank on Nov 17th, 2022

On Thursday, November 17, 2022, Manuel Woschank presented the results of the project SME 4.0 at the “4. Kärntner Logistiktag” of the “Bundesvereinigung Logistik Österreich“ at the University of Klagenfurt. During this presentation, the new EU project SME5.0 was also introduced to the audience.

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