SNU College of Engineering and RWTH Aachen University’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Launch a Smart Factory Joint Research Team
 

▲ (From Left to Right) SNU Professor Chu Chong Nam, Professor Ahn Sung-Hoon, and Professor Youn Byeng Dong of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Professor Yang Insoon of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; RWTH Aachen University Professor Christian Brecher of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
 

SNU College of Engineering (Dean Cha Kook-heon) announces its start of an international joint research for the study of Smart Factory, a crucial topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with RWTH Aachen University, a leading German institution in the field of industry.
 
SNU Professors Chu Chong Nam, Ahn Sung-Hoon, Youn Byeng Dong of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Yang Insoon of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, along with Professor Christian Brecher of RWTH Aachen University’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (also the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute of Production Technology, IPT) participate as a joint research team under the “Korea-Germany Intelligent Manufacturing System Research Center,” one of many projects of the “2018 Basic Lab Support Business (International Joint Research Type)” of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).
 
Bringing the strengths of each lab together, the team collaboratively looks into a wide range of fields including optimization of manufacturing process, robots, 3D printing, sensor development and application, failure prediction and analysis, energy monitoring, communications, AI, and Big Data. SNU is to dispatch its researchers to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of RWTH Aachen University to learn its outstanding industry-university collaboration, hardware, manufacturing simulation skills. Hence, the two schools are planning to share a digital twin of their digitalized manufacturing know-hows.
 
Dean Cha emphasizes, “Smart Factory is a critical field that we must develop for the competitiveness of Korean industry. SNU, being one of the 17 institutions listed in NRF’s 2018 future research agenda, must serve a leading role in both inbound and outbound researches.
 
Professor Ahn, the head of the team, highlights the distinctiveness of this joint research project explaining, “Smart Factory is an essential technology that companies will come across ultimately. Thus, the research must begin from its very fundaments; However, our final ambition is the development of a reasonable Smart Factory that can be utilized by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) at a low cost.”

 

▲ Professor Ahn (Third from Left) and Professor Brecher (Second from Left) Shaking Hands at Joint Research Agreement Ceremony