Skills and workplaces 4.0

In December 2019, the entire consortium of the major European research project “iDev40” (“Integrated Development 4.0”), led by Infineon Technologies Austria AG, met in Graz to take stock at the halfway point of the project and jointly plan the next steps. Professor Sophia Keil, Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration and Engineering Management, and Fabian Lindner, research assistant, represented Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences at the meeting as leaders of the work package “Skills and Jobs 4.0 and Smart Collaboration in ECS Supply Chains”.

The team was able to draw a positive conclusion regarding the project work to date. Prof. Keil’s team, together with its academic partners—in particular the “Human Factors” working group at HTW Dresden— and thanks to the support of semiconductor manufacturers Infineon Technologies at its Dresden and Villach (Austria) locations, as well as Elmos Semiconductor in Dortmund, has already collected a great deal of data through research interviews and observations. This data allows for initial conclusions regarding changing requirements for skills, skills training, job profiles, collaboration (including between humans and machines), knowledge transfer and sharing, as well as the optimal provision of information in production due to the use of digital technologies. The impact of increasingly automated and digitized production on individual workers was also taken into account.

All these factors have been and continue to be taken into account in the design of socio-technical models and systems that reconcile both business-related and individual requirements and needs of workers in high-tech production. To this end, close cooperation with the aforementioned partners is being continued. In particular, work is now beginning—in collaboration with the Virtual Vehicle Competence Center in Graz—to objectively measure and assess the impact of the digital solutions developed as part of the overall “iDev40” project on socio-economic factors. In addition, the insights gained are being incorporated into the design of future study and training programs to optimally prepare students and workers for ongoing digitalization.

Initial publications resulting from the project—led by or with the participation of Prof. Keil’s research group at the Faculty of Business Administration and Engineering Management—can be found at https://f-w.hszg.de/research/integrated-development-40/publications —including presentations at relevant conferences on semiconductor production, such as the “Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC)” and the “European Advanced Process Control and Manufacturing (apc|m) Conference.”