International stage for students: Research on the pulse of time

One of the projects deals with intelligent shared workplaces. The idea was developed by Andreas Gruber, Christian Dragschitz and Dominik Hasiwar in the Infrastructure Engineering course. ‘The ‘Smart Office’ project was inspired by our current shared workplace situation,’ explains Dominik. As the introduction of shared workplaces is a recurring theme in Christian and Dominik's company, they thought about how employees could still be offered an individual working environment. ‘We believe that personalised workplaces promote a good atmosphere and, as a result, motivation.’

Their solution for the changing workplace: among other things, digital picture frames that change depending on the person, or favourite settings for desk height etc. Employees can also use an integrated booking system to book their favourite workstation for a specific period of time. As soon as they stand in front of the booked office desk, all personalised settings for the selected workstation are applied. 

Thanks to the installed Internet of Things (IoT) devices and additional sensors, the project can also be expanded to include a further use case: various environmental values of a workplace, such as the temperature, humidity or CO2 concentration, can be measured and the Workplace Environmental Index (WEI) derived. The data can ultimately be used to intelligently control building technology or identify problems.

Their scientific paper ‘Towards a Cloud-based Smart Office Solution for Shared Workplace Individualisation’ finally made it to the CLOSER conference as a poster presentation with the support of course director Igor Ivkic. And we as a group of companies were also inspired by the former students as part of our New Work considerations. You can read the paper here.

The second project, ‘RePro3D’, has at least as much future potential: Tobias Buhmann, also a former student of the Cloud Computing Engineering Master's programme, course director Igor Ivkic, Burkhard List (external) and Clemens Gnauer (Forschung Burgenland) have teamed up with the start-up b&mi GmbH & Co. KG to regionalise the production processes for webshop orders. Tobias dedicated his master's thesis to this exciting project, which he also presented at the CLOSER conference. 

The aim of the research? ‘We want to increase the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises through the use of additive manufacturing technologies. Anyone who owns a 3D printer can then be a supplier. Traditional value chains can thus be broken up and improved through local production using 3D printing technologies,’ says Tobias.

In practice, the ordering process would look like this:

• A customer buys a product online and selects that it is to be printed regionally.
• The RePro3D platform, which is connected to the web shop via the cloud, then sends the order on to a small and medium-sized enterprise.
• This means that thousands of items are not traditionally produced, flown in from far away and thrown away if they are overproduced. Instead: Production is not initiated until the purchase is made. Either directly via the SME or via an ‘external’, regional 3D printer.
• Similar to Uber, where all car owners can become taxi drivers, this principle would also be possible for 3D print owners in the near future.

Of course, this would have a significant benefit for the environment: This is because it would be possible to dispense with deliveries from afar. Local 3D printing can thus contribute to sustainability and strengthen the regional economy. You can read the paper here.