Smart factories and autonomous mobile robots encourage practical learning. : Date:
From the lecture hall to the smart Factory: how can students be taught about the production and logistics processes of small and medium-sized enterprises in the most practical way possible? How can they learn to organise and analyse these processes as efficiently as possible? Two professors from the Institute for Production Engineering and Factory Operations (IPF) at Bremen University of Applied Sciences have the answer: set up an innovative smart factory.
The smart factory was opened on Tuesday, 12 May 2026, at Bremen's Neustadt Campus in the Department of Mechanical Engineering within the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering. "Our Smart Factory gives our students the opportunity to experience the complete production and logistics process, as it occurs in companies, in a hands-on way and to understand it better," says Prof. Dr. Farian Krohne, who developed and set up the area for the Mechanical Engineering degree programme together with his colleague Prof. Dr. Joachim Schormann over recent years. "This gives students a solid, fundamental understanding of the workflows in companies' production systems." Supporting all of this is Kalle: an autonomous mobile robot roughly one metre tall, used in logistics processes, which handles the transport of all required components within the smart factory.
Autonomous logistics and real-time dashboards
In the newly designed demo factory, the two professors have set up workstations for the assembly of vices for their students in the form of workshop production. From production planning using an Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP system) widely used in practice, to the delivery of a fully assembled vice, all components of an order processing procedure can be experienced first-hand. The special feature: the logistics processes in the Smart Factory are managed entirely digitally with software support. Robot Kalle checks the developed software systems to see whether transport orders exist based on data from the ERP system and carries these out independently. During production, a dashboard also visualises relevant production metrics fully automatically and in real time. This sharpens participants' economic understanding of workflows, makes approaches to process optimisation visible, and allows the impact of implementing improvement measures to be traced.
Practice-oriented further training for companies
Companies also benefit: the IPF offers companies a practice-oriented further training programme for their employees with links to production. During the "Lean Manufacturing" seminar at the smart factory, participants learn how to make processes more efficient, flexible and, at the same time, more transparent by using specific methods. Within the Smart Factory's production system, important experience can thus be gained in a protected, practice-oriented environment, providing the know-how needed to optimise production processes in a targeted way within one's own company.
Smart factory strengthens Bremen University of Applied Sciences' profile
"It is impressive what Prof. Dr. Farian Krohne and Prof. Dr. Joachim Schormann have built here," says Prof. Dr. Konrad Wolf, President of Bremen University of Applied Sciences (HSB). "The smart factory strengthens HSB's profile: practical relevance and transfer to business and society. Students and companies will benefit greatly from the smart factory."
Text source: Bremen University of Applied Sciences