A new “Josef Ressel Center” is being set up at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences to support companies in digitization. The foundations are to be laid for a digital assistant that intelligently supports human operators and more complex machines and thinks about cyber security from the outset. The center is supported by the federal government and works closely with three companies from the automation sector.

The introduction of manufacturing companies to Industry 4.0 means extensive automation, autonomy and optimization of the entire value chain. At the human/computer interface, the new research center aims to develop a digital assistant that receives perceptions from an environment and can influence the environment by recommending human operator input, presenting information, or controlling machines autonomously. “The digital assistant should be able to relieve and support human operators by providing assistance in monitoring and controlling machines. Specifically, this affects people who operate injection molding machines, milling, turning, labeling or filling machines, for example “, explained the head of the center, Stefan Huber, in a broadcast on Wednesday.

“Silicon Valley of Industrial Automation”

Huber described the Salzburg/Upper Austria area as the “Silicon Valley of industrial automation”. Specifically, the Josef Ressel Center will cooperate with the companies B&R Industrial Automation in Eggelsberg (Braunau district), COPA-DATA in the city of Salzburg and SIGMATEK in Lamprechtshausen (Flachgau). Research is to be carried out in the areas of system architectures, artificial intelligence and cyber security, with each of the cooperating companies supporting one of these research fields.

The Josef Ressel Center for Intelligent and Safe Industrial Automation (ISIA) runs from 2022 to 2027. It is already the third JR Center at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences. The “Center for Secure Energy Informatics (ZSE)” emerged from the first “Josef Ressel Center for User-Centric Smart Grid Privacy, Security and Control” (2013-2017). In November 2020 the “Josef Ressel Center for Dependable System-of-Systems Engineering” was opened.