The Smart Production team has an overall focus on new approaches, structures, tools and technologies for factories of the future, industry 4.0 and the industrial Metaverse. Research interests span from the individual processes on the shop floor to factory infrastructure to engineering and design.  Digitalization and digital infrastructures have been the key focus of many of the activities in the group with research looking into seamless IT/OT integration, digital thread, IIoT, data analytics, AI, modularity for easy integration, digital assistive tools for human operators, and semantic modelling.

On the hardware site, the group manage the AAU 5G Smart Production Lab, which is home to a variety of equipment that together form a small factory setup. This allows the research activities in the group to be designed, studied, and validated in a realistic production environment.

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More recent research includes the industrial Metaverse and adaptable material flow in factories. The former is characterized by strong and coherent modelling and data integration across the lifecycle of both products and production systems.

Research into adaptable material flow includes includes both planning, execution and technology aspects. As part of this, novel production paradigms and topologies such as Matrix and Swarm production has become a key focus area in the group, supported by the installation of a Matrix production setup with a planar motion system and six industrial robots in the AAU Smart Production Lab.