Research & Technology Partners

Dr. Ajith Kumar Parlikad, Institute for Manufacturing

Companies today can access unprecedented amounts of information about individual items anywhere in their supply chains. Goods can be tracked around the world providing data that is transforming supply chain management. Combined with highly flexible and responsive production systems, these radical new capabilities are opening up opportunities to provide dynamic services and smart products.

By linking computer networks to sensors and identification technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), almost any information about an individual product or component can be obtained in real time - from its current temperature to when, how and where it was made. This worldwide traceability of components and finished goods can be used to identify product failures, support innovative service offerings or meet legislative requirements. Inventory counts and lost shipments are potentially things of the past as items know exactly how much material is in the supply chain or on the store shelf.

These new capabilities are also helping firms to meet a growing demand for mass customised products and services - supported by automated production systems that are becoming much more flexible and responsive. Using intelligent software, machines can 'co-operate' with each other to decide how to rapidly reconfigure manufacturing systems and supply networks in order to meet consumer demand or to overcome unexpected problems.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Karl Letschert, Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Computer Sciences

The University of Applied Sciences at Friedberg-Giessen offers a broad spectrum of research and teaching expertise. Its research is strongly influenced by its collaborative projects with industry, commerce and the service sector. A number of projects are supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as well as the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts.

With 36 professors and 35 research associates the faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Computer Sciences is among the largest faculties of the university. A lot of projects are carried out with small and medium sized enterprises in the Rhine-Main Region (around Frankfurt) and throughout Germany. The expertise includes many fields of information technology such as enterprise architectures, software technology, quality management and robotics.

Prof. Dr. Bernd Freisleben, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

There are two main areas of work we do in our research group. On the one hand, we concentrate on methods and approaches for simplifying the development of distributed or networked applications. On the other hand, we look at applications that gain additional benefits from being executed in a distributed computing environment.

Current subjects of our work are software infrastructures, services and tools for cluster/network/grid computing, middleware for internet application environments, as well as architectures and algorithms for mobile/ubiquitous computing applications.

We directly draw requirements from application development for use in our middleware development efforts. Many of those applications are developed in interdisciplinary activities with partners from a diverse range of interest fields such as electrical and mechanical engineering, physics, bioinformatics, economics and media research. We often use methods for distributed data analysis, simulation and optimization to solve computationally expensive problems from those areas. Due to the nature of these problems, methods inspired by nature (e.g. evolutionary algorithms, neural networks) are sometimes used in the solutions.