Dr. Christian Hillbrand, senior lecturer at the Van Riemsdijk Chair in Entrepreneurship, along with Susanne Schmid and Robert Schöch, received the Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Modeling and Applied Simulation.
The conference is regarded as one of the leading conferences on industrial simulation, and took place in Rome from 12 to 14 September 2011. The paper entitled Building a System for Automated Modeling and Simulation of Plants was selected by the international programme committee as the best of more than 300 articles accepted and assessed.
Alongside his duties as senior lecturer at the University of Liechtenstein, Christian Hillbrand manages the Technical Logistics business area at the V-Research research centre in Dornbirn. As part of a research and development cooperation with the plant manufacturer Schelling (Schwarzach in Vorarlberg, Austria), which has been ongoing for several years, Christian Hillbrand’s team was able to develop a new method to emulate complex production plants. This uses a model to depict the behaviour and structure of plant modules. By coupling the model with the actual plant control system, the dynamic behaviour in any overall plant can be simulated and visualized in a virtual environment. This can be used to derive important parameters such as achievable cycle times, throughput rates and any bottlenecks in the production sequence. As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of panel-dividing machines, Schelling is currently introducing the developed approach as a sales and project planning tool for plant customers.
The recognition of the work with the Best Paper Award at the renowned scientific conference demonstrates that the subject is not only highly relevant for industrial application, but that it also makes a substantial contribution academically.
Left to right: Christian Hillbrand, Susanne Schmid and Robert Schöch are the authors of the paper.