Stage – Lifecycle management of plug-and-play production modules

VIVENTRIS – Smart production solutions for the industry of tomorrow

Viventris develops smart and flexible production solutions that help companies improve their processes and make them future-proof. We specialize in visual inspection and assembly, with applications in consumer products, high-tech systems, and healthcare, among others.

Our strength lies in combining generic building blocks with customer-specific customization. This allows us to realize efficient and reliable solutions for the production of compact and often complex products. We work pragmatically and closely with our clients to achieve results quickly and make a real impact on the shop floor.

Within our focus area of assembly, we automate manual processes and complex operations, leading to increased product quality and improved efficiency. Within our inspection expertise, we develop advanced vision systems utilizing both rule-based algorithms and AI. This enables accurate product inspection and reliable defect detection.

With our solutions, we contribute to smarter production processes and consistent product quality.

Lifecycle management of plug-and-play production modules

Future production systems consist of modular production modules that are flexibly combined and reused. To make this scalable, not only the physical machine is important, but especially how a module is described, recognized, and managed throughout its entire lifecycle.

In this internship, you will work on a structured way to model and describe production modules, making them easily deployable and interchangeable within a modular production system.

Goal

Developing a generic approach for describing and managing plug-and-play production modules, enabling unambiguous reuse and integration based on MBSE principles.

What are you going to do?

• You are starting to look into model-based systems engineering principles and how they can be used to describe mechatronic systems.
• You are analyzing how a production module can be unambiguously described throughout its entire lifecycle: from design and implementation to deployment in a production system and any reconfiguration or reuse. In doing so, you are investigating what information is minimally necessary to make a module understandable and integrable within a modular production concept.
• Next, you will work on a generic model for production modules that captures mechanical, electrical, and functional properties as part of a structured system description. This description forms the basis for explicitly defining what a module can do (capabilities), which interfaces are available, and under which conditions it can be used.
• An important part is the development of an MBSE-based approach that connects requirements, system design, and module properties. The focus here is on traceability between user requirements (URS), system functionality, and concrete module implementations.
• In addition, you will investigate how modules can describe themselves within a standard structure, so that they can be automatically recognized and interpreted within a production system. This forms the basis for plug-and-play integration and reuse across different machines and projects.
• Finally, you will work on a concept for version control and configuration management of production modules, so that changes in hardware, software, or functionality remain traceable throughout the entire lifecycle.

Result

A practical and generic description and lifecycle approach for production modules, enabling modules to be more easily reused, interconnected, and managed in modular production systems.

Required skills

• A mechatronics education or similar
• Affinity for software engineering
• Interest in systems thinking and MBSE
• Prerequisites: knowledge of requirements engineering or systems engineering