- The Service-Meister consortium and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) present roadmap for the next three years
- Six speed boat projects from the industry show AI-use cases for Service-Meister
The Service-Meister project was formally launched in Frankfurt am Main on 11 February 2020. Service-Meister was chosen for funding as part of the AI innovation competition of the German government. eco – Association of the Internet Industry, as consortium leader, invited all members of the consortium with the industry speed boat projects to Frankfurt am Main for the launch. Together they agreed on the next steps for implementing the platform. Tandems of industrial companies and implementation partners will now solve concrete service problems with the help of artificially intelligent tools and procedures.
Combining research and industry requirements
At the kick-off, the six speed boat projects presented what they are actually aiming for within the framework of Service-Meister. For example, KROHNE Messtechnik and Inovex are planning to develop a solution for the remote maintenance of wastewater systems. “Our more than 10,000 customers worldwide in KROHNE’s water/wastewater segment want AI-based tools to evaluate the IoT data of their systems in real time, to predict unexpected maintenance cases or to minimize the effort required during maintenance, i.e. to schedule the right tool and the right technician right away,” is how Martin Krawczyk-Becker from KROHNE describes his motivation for participating in Service-Meister.
As part of the kick-off, all those involved specified the schedule for the project. One challenge, for example, is to transfer the requirements from the practical speed boat projects to the research projects and to make the results of these projects usable in practice. Service-Meister will be set up and expanded for platform operation over the next three years, in line with the BMWi funding period.
Roadmap points the way to successful implementation
Andreas Weiss, Head of Digital Business Models at the eco Association says: “With the launch of Service-Meister, an exciting time begins: In the following three years, we will develop solutions based on artificial intelligence, by means of which small and medium-sized enterprises can access the required knowledge and technology anywhere and anytime.” Weiss is head of the Digital Business Models division and is responsible for AI topics at eco. In addition to the aforementioned industrial companies, the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), the Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin, the Institute for Internet Security if(is), the Institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST), the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST and the Trusted Cloud e. V. competence network are also involved.
Industrial companies and implementation partners solve concrete service problems
An important subgoal is to enable less skilled professionals to provide complex services with the help of digital advisors such as AI-based service bots and smart services. The second subgoal is to create a platform for digitalized service knowledge to enable the cross-company scalability of services. This creates a service ecosystem that counteracts the shortage of skilled workers in Germany and makes German SMEs competitive in the long term.
On the industrial side, WĂĽrth and the Trumpf Group, Atlas Copco, KEB Automation and Krohne Messtechnik are among the companies participating in the project. Implementation partners are inovex, grandcentrix and USU Software. The AI solutions are available to SMEs as leading-edge innovations, which contain a radical new technological feature, through the Service-Meister platform.
Further information about Service-Meister
Website of the Service-Meister project (in German)
