LCM – Linz Center for Symbiotic Mechatronics

Climate change, ubiquitous digitization, and globalization pose substantial challenges to the world’s ecology, economies, and societies. Technical systems are key to facilitate the required societal and economic adaptations and substantial progress has been made in recent years with respect to such systems’ abilities to handle complex tasks at affordable costs, in particular due to the added “smartness”.
Smart technical systems impress by simplicity despite a convincing functionality and performance. Traditional mechatronics promoted such smartness by the subtle comprehension and design of “internal” interactions of mechanical, electrical, electronic components and software. Digital Trans-formation establishes more intense “external” interactions of mechatronic systems with various and changing entities around: the cyber world, other technical systems, humans, nature.

In funding period 1, the Center started developing its answers to the opportunities and challenges of this transformation for mechatronic systems under the central idea “Symbiotic Mechatronics”. It postulates that mutually supporting of internal and external entities facilitates simplicity and ro-bustness of solutions. Its realization demands advancing both, the technologies relevant for mech-atronic systems and the engineering methods and tools to take full advantage of its potentials.

The Center made numerous leading-edge contributions in the fields drives and actuators, sensors and communication devices, frequently stimulated by the world class innovations and strategies of its industrial partners. Modeling and simulation—always a stronghold of the Center—was consider-ably advanced emphasizing connectivity of different models and disciplines, seamless information flow and data integrity. Already existing software platforms were strengthened in these respects and also in functional depth. Artificial Intelligence, a technology to realize more autonomy and to complement traditional methods, e.g., for predictive maintenance, became a widely used solution principle. Symbiosis turned out being a helpful paradigm also for new approaches for these engi-neering methods.

In funding period 2, engineering methods and their realization by software tools will become an even more important part of the work to realize the smartness of technical systems in a more digit-ized world. Mastering complexity has turned out as one of the most critical issues in the successful implementation and Digital Transformation associated with complex systems, which requires a con-sistent modeling throughout the product life cycle. Modeling is one of the most powerful means for knowledge transfer into practice, provided the engineers acting are well trained and experi-enced in the relevant disciplines and able to exploit and develop adequate software tools. These human resources are a major contribution of the Center to mastering technological and societal challenges. Advanced methods and technologies as well as broad skills in the engineering sciences are indispensable to achieve a central target of the new research program: saving of short re-sources, such as energy, critical materials, and unspoiled nature.

The proposed budget of the Center amounts to EUR 53,33 million for five years. 46 company part-ners as well as 32 national and 19 international scientific partners contribute to the research pro-gram. To provide the scientific fundamentals, 20 % of the research will be purely strategic, an addi-tional share of 15 % of the multi-firm projects will be dedicated to strategic research as well.

The research results will preserve the Center’s long-term international visibility and will help the Austrian economy to take full advantage of Digital Transformation and to strengthen its leadership as providers of resource saving technical systems or manufacturers.