7. Life Cycle Design and Engineering Lab in the Open Hybrid LabFactory

Engineering processes for innovative and eco-efficient automotive components show a high degree of labour division. Domain-specific information needs to be exchanged between actors and serves as input for decision-making, e.g. information on part performance, weight, cost or environmental impact. In current engineering practice, this cross-domain communication tends to be streamlined up to the level of selected and simplified KPI that represent the progress of individual disciplines. This hinders a holistic improvement of products and processes. Research within the MultiMaK2 project emphasizes the importance of a joint knowledge building between engineering disciplines and aims at creating a cross-domain understanding of root causes for hotspots and goal conflicts. Therefore, the Life Cycle Design & Engineering Lab was established at the Open Hybrid LabFactory. It objectifies the methodological approach of visual analytics through domain spanning software toolchains, centralized data acquisition, analytics methods as well as a variety of visualization tools and hardware elements that serve the described goals.