The AAU Smart Production Laboratory for Teaching and Research in Emerging Digital Manufacturing Technologies

The AAU Smart Production project is a research initiative at Aalborg University, Denmark running 2015-2019. The objective of this program is to research and demonstrate emergent digital technologies and to adapt these to the needs and characteristics of Danish industries. A Smart Production Laboratory (Smart Lab) has been developed as part of the project. The Smart Lab is a small Industry 4.0 factory containing a number of digital technologies which are integrated into a physical Industry 4.0 demonstrator. Since its establishment in August 2016, a number of projects have been initiated involving more than 50 students and researchers from various departments at Aalborg University. Most of these projects have been made in collaboration with large end-user companies and a number system integrators and technology providers (most of which are SMEs). There has been a great industrial interest in the Smart Lab. Over the last six months, more than 150 companies have visited the lab, and the interest in engaging in projects by far exceeds our capacity. In the future, we are going to focus on setting up collaboration with SME end-users. Furthermore, we will investigate more systematic approaches for improving the knowledge sharing between the on-going projects and enabling better knowledge co-creation. The paper will present the Smart Lab, and demonstrate how we are teaching and researching using a collaborative approach engaging with end-user, vendors and system integrators.