Virtual Product Creation in Industry: The Difficult Transformation from IT Enabler Technology to Core Engineering Competence

Today, digital technologies represent an absolute must when it comes to creating new products and factories. However, day-to-day product development and manufacturing engineering operations have still only unlocked roughly fifty percent of the "digital potential". The question is why? This book provides compelling answers and remedies to that question. Its goal is to identify the main strengths and weaknesses of today’s set-up for digital engineering working solutions, and to outline important trends and developments for the future.

The book concentrates on explaining the critical basics of the individual technologies, before going into deeper analysis of the virtual solution interdependencies and guidelines on how to best align them for productive deployment in industrial and collaborative networks. Moreover, it addresses the changes needed in both, technical and management skills, in order to avoid fundamental breakdowns in running information technologies for virtual product creation in the future.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Stark is University Professor and Director of the Chair of Industrial Information Technology at the TU Berlin (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Transport Systems, Department of Machine Tools and Factory Management) since 2008. Besides his additional leadership responsibility as Director of the division "Virtual Product Creation" at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology until 2021 he serves as active member in the acatech research council Industrie 4.0, as board member of the prostep ivip association and as member in national and international academic societies (WiGeP, CIRP, Design Society).

He previously worked in the automotive industry for nearly 14 years: first as a system engineer in the area of car body development for roughly four years, and then as Technical Leader / Manager of C3P (CAD, CAM, CAE, Product Information Management) and Digital Engineering in various national and international positions(including responsibility for digital methods for Ford, Jaguar/Land Rover, Volvo and Mazda).