AIMM

AIMM is an EAISI lab and it is TU/e’s first lab within the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI). AIMM can be seen as a Smart Industry project, promoting excellence in research and education in close cooperation with the industry. In this project, we collaborate closely with KMWE, Lely, Marel, Nexperia and NXP. In total, we have 10 PhD students that are fully paid by these companies. We do data-driven research, based on real data, and apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) techniques to obtain more efficient and sustainable manufacturing and maintenance operations.

The team consists of the following members:

• Scientific Directors: prof. Ivo Adan (IE&IS) and prof. Geert-Jan van Houtum (IE&IS)
• Lab Director: Shane Ó Seasnáin (EAISI)
• Industry Representatives: Jan Driessen (Nexperia), Arthur van Hout (KMWE), Oscar Moers (Lely), Jeannette Lankhaar (Marel), Marco Vijfvinkel (Marel), Kai Schelthoff (NXP). The industry representatives identify important trends for their companies and they identify potential topics for new PhD projects.
• Core Team Researchers: dr. Mike Holenderski (M&CS), dr. Stella Kapodistria (M&CS), prof. George Fletcher (M&CS), prof. Mykola Pechenizkiy (M&CS), prof. Wim Nuijten (EAISI, MCS), prof. Nathan van der Wouw (ME), prof. Lin-Lin Chen (ID), dr. Mathias Funk (ID), dr. Davide Leonetti (BE), dr. Alp Akçay (IE&IS), dr. Tugce Martagan (IE&IS)

The goal of AIMM is to create an environment in which researchers from multiple disciplines directly collaborate with industry to identify smart industry challenges, define research roadmaps and perform data-driven research.  The novelty is that research is based on real industry data provided by the industry partners and, in most cases, carried out by PhD students who work a few days per week at the partners. The PhD students are all fully funded by the industry partners (a few PhD students are funded by the IMPULS program, a few other PhD students are on the payroll of the partners). This means that the industry partners have a very high commitment and are eager to execute pilots and possibly to really implement newly developed algorithms. We do  practice-based research, which is well recognized by other scholars in our field. We have successfully participated in multiple practice-based research competitions; see also the references to such competitions in Section 5. The lab’s goal is to become a national and international centre of manufacturing and maintenance excellence in cooperation with companies from the Brainport region.

The AIMM Lab holds regular meetings between scientific directors, lab managers, and industry representatives every three months to discuss progress on PhD projects and trends in the field. These meetings also identify topics for online workshops that are open to scholars and practitioners. The core team, including scientific and lab directors, meet every two months to discuss research projects, contributions to online workshops, and upcoming research calls. For the overview of relevant calls, a project officer of IE&IS is involved as well. These discussions have led to new funded research projects. One success story involves the establishment of an IMPULS project at Marel, which will create a thinking assistant for maintenance based on knowledge graphs. The lab director played a key role in finding the right professors to present and ultimately securing the project. Another success story is the granting of the AIMS 5.0 European project, which aims to revolutionize the manufacturing industry through the development of AI-enabled hardware and software components across the entire value chain. This is the result of collaboration of researchers of AIMM from the IE&IS and CS department, yielding 6 PhD positions and 1 Postdoc position.