
TU/e-EAISI and industry define new ICAI-lab for “AI-enabled manufacturing and maintenance”
Together with a number of industrial partners, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) has set up a new ICAI-lab to improve decision making in manufacturing and maintenance using artificial intelligence. The new EAISI lab “AI-enabled Manufacturing and Maintenance” (AIMM) is the first ICAI-Lab in Eindhoven.
TU/e has had a multi-disciplinary Smart Manufacturing and Maintenance research program for several years,
in order to develop better data science techniques and information from complex systems to improve
manufacturing and maintenance. With the establishment of TU/e’s AI institute EAISI last year and the
growing trend of using AI to accomplish even more sophisticated tasks, it is an obvious evolution of the
program to establish the EAISI AI-enabled Manufacturing and Maintenance (AIMM) lab.
AIMM aims to promote research in cooperation with high-tech industry and is a collaboration with the four industrial
partners Nexperia, KMWE, Marel and Lely. These companies have a solid history of commitment to developing new innovative approaches in their respective industries and are looking forward to working in close partnership with the TU/e.
Important step
Carlo van de Weijer, director of EAISI, welcomes the establishment of the new ICAI lab as an important step.
“We are proud that we can contribute towards a responsible and ethical use of AI. This cooperation will have
benefits for innovation, development of talent and will result in a much stronger role for AI in the Dutch
economy.”
As part of the initiative, seven PhD research positions will perform joint research at the business partners
and the TU/e. The areas of research will directly interface with topics such as Autonomous Agents &
Robotics, Computer Vision, Decision Making, information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation & Reasoning,
NLP and Machine Learning. AIMM Lab will be under the academic supervision of Ivo Adan and Geert-Jan van Houtum.
It is expected that the EAISI AIMM research lab will also become a fertile starting point for new initiatives,
such as developing online trainings and placing Master and final year Bachelor students in projects with
companies. The lab will also provide companies with better access to expertise in potential applications of
artificial intelligence such as improved planning, detecting anomalies in production, predicting quality issues
and enabling fast root cause analysis.