Continental is digitalising its entire production process for automotive components. To help achieve this, the company has formed a partner consortium with eight IT and process optimisation companies, universities and specialist start-ups. The three-year project is called “Digitalisation of the Industrialisation Process in the Automotive and Supplier Industries” (or DIAZI) and is funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

The aim of the DIAZI project is digital transformation of the company’s production plants. In the future, Continental production lines will be planned, simulated and operated digitally. The company want its plants to achieve faster development cycles and keep abreast of complex supply chains and changing customer requirements. The results of the DIAZI project is designed to make industrialisation of the automotive industry more effective.

“DIAZI is a major step toward the digitalisation of the automotive industry,” said Thomas Ebenhöch, head of operations for the User Experience (UX) business area in Continental Automotive. “As the lead company in the DIAZI project, Continental is driving a new approach to effective and sustainable production processes in the automotive and supplier industries. We’re already a leader in the development of digital components such as intelligent display solutions. Now, through digital simulation, artificial intelligence and data management in the cloud, we’re bringing innovations to market faster, more efficiently, more sustainably and more cost-effectively across the manufacturing industry. Early results show we’re on the right track. Our vision of the ‘digital factory’ is clearly taking shape.”

The DIAZI project is based on the “digital factory”, with new production plants created virtually before physical commissioning.

The project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and financed by the European Reconstruction and Resilience Facility, started on January 1, 2023, and is designed to run for around three years. “The dynamic transformation of the automotive sector into a highly digitalised industry offers enormous potential”, said Ernst Stöckl-Pukall, head of Digitalisation, Industry 4.0 at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. “Cooperation across company boundaries, as practised in the DIAZI project, represent a key component for the entire industry. The findings and demonstrators from the project have the potential to be adapted to numerous companies and production lines and serve as an impulse generator for fully digitalised and AI-supported production processes.”

The first phase of the project, which has now been completed, aimed to define specific demonstration models within various fields of digitalisation in order to include the entire virtual line planning and commissioning process, from data-based process optimisation to application operation. Experts from Landshut University of Applied Sciences, the Technical University of Braunschweig, the software start-up IFOX Systems, the IT management company Suse, the intralogistics expert Naise, the process and production optimiser Dualis and plus10, a provider of analysis software for automated production plants, were involved in the process.