With our Engineering Automation Competence Center, we strategically integrate artificial intelligence and scalable automation solutions into companies' product development processes. Engineering Automation stands for the targeted use of AI and automation to make development processes more efficient, consistent, and data-driven. At its core is the close collaboration between developers, engineering co-pilots, AI agent systems, and future-proof engineering IT. We understand Engineering Automation as a shared mission – from the initial idea to sustainable integration.

Companies today face immense pressure: global competition, increasing complexity, and a shortage of skilled workers pose significant challenges, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). At the same time, many companies hesitate to widely adopt AI – often due to a lack of strategies or insufficient data. Furthermore, manual, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks along the development process limit efficiency and speed.

Our goal is to develop tailored, AI-supported engineering processes that deliver concrete solutions to these challenges. We rely on state-of-the-art technologies and a consistent technology transfer from research to application, where strategy and implementation go hand in hand. Together with companies, we analyze existing processes, tools, and data flows, identify relevant use cases for AI in product development, and assess their potential. Based on this, we develop proofs of concept and scalable solutions for production operation.

Engineering Automation describes the use of artificial intelligence and automation throughout the entire development process – from the early idea phase to validation. Large Language Models form a central foundation. Using the retrieval-augmented generation principle, these models are enriched with domain-specific knowledge from engineering databases as well as PLM and ALM systems. Fine-tuning is then employed to align the models with industry-specific terminologies, processes, and standards. AI agents take on defined tasks, exchange results, and integrate them into the development process. To achieve this, we consider engineering IT from the outset and provide secure environments, powerful AI tools, and modern platforms.

The goal is to significantly accelerate development processes, increase efficiency, and open up new avenues for innovation. Engineering automation specifically relieves developers of time-consuming routine tasks and reduces the administrative burden of daily operations. Automated workflows and AI-supported assistance systems noticeably shorten time-to-market and make speed a competitive advantage. At the same time, end-to-end, data-driven automation solutions reduce error-prone manual tasks and sustainably improve quality.

This ensures end-to-end consistency in the development process, traceability, and a solid basis for decision-making. Our goal is not to create isolated prototypes, but to sustainably integrate AI into development processes – for genuine added value and future viability. Sound research findings are consistently translated into concrete applications.