Smart Enterprise Engineering

The DFKI research department Smart Enterprise Engineering, headed by Prof. Dr. Oliver Thomas, researches digital business models for the company of the future. All projects are application-oriented and are developed in close cooperation with large international corporations as well as with “hidden champions“ and SMEs. New and innovative methods and tools for the design and application of Smart Products, Smart Services and Smart Systems are developed and applied in various federal, state and industry-financed projects.
 
Prof. Thomas' DFKI team emphasises the comprehensive digital retrival, processing and use of data with the aim to infer new data-based value creation mechanisms. For this purpose, humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are interpreted as part of a common value-added system and their cooperative performance is brought into focus.
 
Already researched and technically implemented fields of application include recommender agents for company organisation, middleware platforms for the design of process structures, mobile and portable assistance systems for the proactive provision of information in technical service areas, in Logistics and in Healthcare as well as the prediction of system states in Mechanical Engineering and in Retail. These topics position autonomous systems and services as important tools for enterprise information management.
 
The Smart Enterprise Engineering research department's vision is to combine the perspectives of information systems and AI to leverage the potential of comprehensive information provision and to exploit competitive advantages, especially for SMEs, by supporting and (partially) automating complex activities. Prof. Thomas pays particular attention to the interdisciplinary orientation, which consistently expands his business management focus with necessary technological perspectives.
 
The research department headed by Prof. Thomas works closely with the Department of Information Management and Information Systems (IMWI) at Osnabrück University and is involved in the Lower Saxony innovation network SmartHybrid.