Fraunhofer IESE brings humanity to digitization

Everyone is fascinated by the inherent synergy of human twins but imagine a digital twin that can know you better than you know yourself.

In essence, that’s what Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Engineering (IESE) has accomplished after years of ground-breaking data research now applied for organizations around the world.

Fraunhofer IESE is one of 76 institutes and research units of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Together they have a major impact on shaping applied research in Europe and contribute to Germany’s competitiveness in international markets.

Partnering with NetApp for an intelligent data infrastructure approach, Fraunhofer IESE has bridged the physical and digital worlds by integrating disparate data sources – their provenance, workflows, and intelligence. For example, think about thousands of IOT devices from a complex manufacturing line, critical biomarkers for cancer research, or carbon dioxide footprints in a global supply chain.

If something goes wrong in any of these real-life examples, it is challenging to stop a production line, troubleshoot the cause, then start back up. The production costs would be too great.

Dr. Thomas Kuhn devotes his professional life to figuring out these complex challenges. As the Division Manager of Embedded Systems at Fraunhofer IESE, he’s been working in a research cooperation with Jürgen Hamm, Solution Architect, at NetApp since 2018 on how to create a global, standardized system that can handle the entire information lifecycle.

Take this pen

To simplify the challenge, Kuhn used the example of a ballpoint pen. The parts of the pen may be manufactured in different countries, all with different rules.

“You are responsible not only for your product, but for all parts that make up this product as long as they are part of your supply chain,” he said. “You have to ensure that the calculated carbon dioxide footprint is accurate – also those parts that reflect the CO2 emissions from your suppliers. These things and more can only be proven if you have a digital supply chain. If you do, you can use a digital twin to automatically assemble a digital product passport.”

In other words, accountability in international business is vital.

“We know that the things that we do help companies,” Kuhn said. “We have now 650,000 downloads of our open-source platform, and that’s quite a lot for such a specialized software.”

The solution first started in the manufacturing industry but has now grown into additional industries and use cases: pharma, construction, public, semiconductor industry, and more.

“It’s the greatest thing when somebody picks up your work and does something beneficial,” Kuhn said. “We have applications in critical infrastructure. We use it for virtual test beds, for highly automated driving functions, predictive systems, and much more.”

To power these solutions, Fraunhofer IESE uses several technologies, including NetApp’s ONTAP and StorageGRID. But the key here is a robust integration of the Digital Twin technology.

“You need an intelligent data infrastructure,” said Hamm, who has led the effort to architect a system that can easily integrate and scale. “We use Kubernetes. We support Red Hat OpenShift. We also use NetApp® Trident™ and take snapshots with Trident Protect. Behind everything is StorageGRID, which of course is a highly efficient, cost-effective hybrid cloud appliance.”

With this solution, organizations can easily troubleshoot issues with digital twin and benefit in multiple ways:

• Save months of paperwork and research.
• Easily tackle legal requirements.
• Accelerate onboarding processes.
• Confidently QA products or add new features.
• Long-term validation in transportation and facilities (e.g. bridges).

In manufacturing, for example, digital twins can cut development costs by 30% while reducing time to integrate new devices from two days to 10 minutes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, recent projects involve artificial intelligence, which benefit from having digital twins for testing and to better manage the complex workflows and large language models (LLMs).

“AI has a huge potential,” Kuhn said. “With LLMs, we can create a bridge to our data space. For example, we can create an interface so that modern AI applications can optimize production strategies, create new virtual test beds, for better products. All of this becomes possible only if you have access to the underlying data – using the digital twin.”

The opportunities for a digital enterprise are endless. The first step is implementing an intelligent data infrastructure that can accommodate your goals and future-proof your digital projects. Then you can integrate and optimize data into untold applications.

Fraunhofer IESE is convinced that the interconnection of systems and sensors in collaborative, smart ecosystems will determine our future.

“For infrastructure, for compute, NetApp is our partner because NetApp knows how to scale things very well and how to create a reliable infrastructure,” Kuhn said. “For our customers, it’s important to have this ecosystem.”