Lufthansa Technik AG

Towards a Smart Factory – Digitization for the workshop

Description of the company
Lufthansa Technik is a global leader in maintenance, repair and overhaul services as well as modifications in the civil aviation industry. With tailor-made maintenance programs and the most advanced repair procedures, we ensure the reliability and availability of our customers' aircraft.
We are independent of aircraft manufacturers and are internationally licensed as a repair, manufacturing and development company. With more than 26,000 employees and over 30 international subsidiaries, the Lufthansa Technik Group offers a complete service to around 800 customers around the world in its Maintenance, Overhaul, Equipment, Engines, Chassis, VIP Services, Innovation and Digital Fleet Solutions business units around aircraft technology.
The project is provided and supervised by the IT department "Engineering and Shop Floor Solutions". The division is responsible for the development and supportof IT solutions for digitization in workshops and integration of operational technology for the Lufthansa Technik Group.

Initial situation
The topic Industrie 4.0 and the resulting efforts to increase digitization and the level of automation across all areas of a company offer great potential for optimization and are an important technology driver today. In the industrial environment, there are only a few applications in use, especially in sectors that are characterized by manual processes, such as aviation. At Lufthansa Technik, digitalization is consistently pushed at all levels of the value chain. Many projects have made great progress in recent years. The project presented here supports the integration of Operational Technology in the production environment and should contribute to the long-term goal of the way towards a smart factory.

Problem
The repair and overhaul of components, as carried out at Lufthansa Technik, differ from classic production. On the one hand, the process chain is dynamically dependent on findings, on the other hand, components are often adapted to one another and processing is adaptive. The exchange of data between different stations in the process chains, as well as the processing and evaluation of process-complementary information, such as environmental sensors, is now mainly manual.

Project goals   
In this project, concepts for the integration of existing machines should be developed and implemented. Various possibilities are to be designed to acquire data from machines that today do not have a suitable interface in order to collect and evaluate information such as operating conditions and physical measured values. For this purpose, the use of external sensors for the expansion of a system, as well as the detection and evaluation of existing sensors, has to be investigated. In order to make the integration of existing systems economically feasible in the future, the results of the analysis will be used to determine a minimal range of devices that meets the requirements of the digital integration of a system. Afterwards, the developed concept has to be practically validated by the implementation on a production machine. In addition to a specific sensor selection and physical integration, this also includes a connection to the existing IT infrastructure of Lufthansa Technik and the development of a simple application for displaying and evaluating the data. The project team implements the development as an independent Scrum team with the support of the supervising department.

Tasks
·    Analysis and derivation of a device spectrum for the digital integration of production machine
·    Selection of suitable sensors
·    Physical integration of the devices into the IT infrastructure
·    Development of an application for displaying and evaluating the obtained information

Target group
For this project we are looking for students specializing in mechatronics, informatics engineering or electrical engineering, who are passionate about operational technology and digitization. In addition to a structured way of working, the willingness to work in an agile Scrum team is necessary.

Dates
Please reserve these dates:

• 17 October: Information event with te companies, from 10am to 12pm, mainbuilding A; LuK
• 24 October: Kick-off event, from 2pm to 6pm (obligatory attendance)
• 27 October and 3 November: Project management course, full day (obligatory attendance)
• 30 October: Clarification of the order, first meeting with the company, 3pm - 6pm; Lufthansa Technik Basis, Weg beim Jäger 193, 22335 Hamburg