The ICNAP Community aims to find more flexible and efficient ways of designing sophisticated value chains for the manufacturing of complex and customized products. We do not believe that the development and improvement of production technology as such represents our main challenge: this is the brief or our three existing institutes which already cover a wide range of technologies. ICNAP has instead been set up to demonstrate and to validate the potential benefits of digitalization and research cooperation for a wide range of technology products, production processes and corporate networks.
The digitalization and networking of individual items of technological equipment or even entire biotechnology facilities, of data streams, data formats, data standards and interfaces creates the space in which ICNAP can operate as a mediator between different dimensions: the real world of components, tools and machinery and the virtual world of process data and component specs.