Membership in the Community of the International Center for Networked, Adaptive Production

Many of today’s future-oriented businesses are still searching for competent partners and service providers who are sufficiently familiar with the requirements and specifications of Industrie 4.0 to help them on their way into a sustainable future.

Is it enough to provide all their machines and items of equipment with Internet technology, to establish process parameters and to transmit status messages? Or should they aim to achieve a full digitalization of their production lines, using real time analyses to identify potential sources of error and staying continuously in the optimum corridor of their manufacturing processes?

The network of partners in our moderated research community provides you with access to the results of fundamental research and practice-oriented development efforts:

Your benefit:

  • production data and software developments which you will be able to test in your production systems
  • a fully networked test environment in one of Europe’s most modern and versatile machine parks
  • sophisticated sensor systems
  • fast wireless 5G data transmission
  • connections to Fraunhofer’s “Virtual Fort Knox” cloud.

Three ways in which you can benefit from our developments

Companies can participate in the work as partners of ICNAP and use the latest research results. We offer you the following cooperation possibilities:

 

Opportunities for cooperation

Your membership in our exclusive moderated research community will provide you with access to the latest research results and sophisticated technology infrastructures. Community membership enables you to conduct joint as well as individual research projects with or without the involvement of other ICNAP partners.

We and our community would like to help you to open the black box of your manufacturing machinery and processes. You will decide which of your data you want to share:

We provide you with the opportunity of customizing our standard test environment to your specific conditions and requirements within the mutually agreed projects. Your contribution to the costs will depend on the extent and complexity of the required effort and on your chosen form of the project’s commercial exploitation.

If you opt to protect the results of individualized projects as your company’s exclusive intellectual property, you alone stand to benefit. If, conversely, you are prepared to share selected production data in the jointly used community cloud, you will also support your ICNAP partners, making a valuable contribution to the overall progress of Industrie 4.0.

By making test data from actual production processes available, the ICNAP creates perfect conditions for the development and evaluation of new solutions – without any need for you to put further stress on your corporate resources. The test environment of the Fraunhofer IPT thereby addresses a central problem that is generated by the implementation of Industrie 4.0 technologies, allowing you to avoid costly downtimes of your production equipment while you are developing new solutions.

On top of that, we offer IT providers the opportunity of implementing their hardware and software products in a sophisticated test environment. This allows you not only to support us in the expansion of the range and the performance of the test environment, but also to test your own systems for their functional efficiency, reliability and flexibility under highly realistic conditions.

Fraunhofer is known for its determination not to let innovative ideas gather dust on academic bookshelves but to develop them into marketable products that can create added value both for their manufacturers and for our society as a whole. This is why we are committed to paying consistent attention to the business potential of the ICNAP’s research and development efforts, right from the drawing board stage. We want to help you set up a realistic roadmap for the implementation of the results in your company – at an early stage of the process.

If you decide to conduct an individual ICNAP project with one or more of the Fraunhofer partners, we can assist you, managing the process of developing and practically implementing ideas from the design stage to the transfer of the newly acquired knowledge to your workforce, with or without the involvement of cooperation partners from the community (this is for you to decide). Your contribution to the costs of any such customized project whose commercial results are going to be exclusively enjoyed by your company will depend on the extent and complexity of the required effort. Any such fee will be amicably agreed.

Further information about membership in the ICNAP Community

Range of services

What services do members of the ICNAP Community receive?

Become a member

We would be pleased to advise you personally on membership in the ICNAP Community.

Members of ICNAP