R2B - Ro­bot to Busi­ness

The research project R2B is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs (BMWi) and aims at the configuration of technical processes from comprehensive business processes to be executed automatically - as far as possible and wanted. This will be done in an exemplary way for the application domains agriculture, machinery and construction machinery, and IT-maintenance.

There is a particular need for action in these domains because business processes in agriculture, construction and IT service are characterized by the interdependency of different workflows as well as influences that cannot be planned such as technical problems or effects of the weather etc. Therefore, this project will develop technologies and solutions to manage such dynamic business processes. Systems will be set up that behave like organisms and adapt themselves automatically to environmental conditions and user needs. This project will therefore integrate partly autonomous processes and mobile machines into dynamic business models and service models. With this, process flows are made possible that can be adjusted dynamically to environments characterized by significant manual interference or by stochastic influences. The data transfer with back-office accounting systems for example will be realized and machines and process units will integrate themselves into work flows. This leads to a behavioural orientation of complex systems enabling partly autonomous support of complex, distributed, heterogeneous plants.
The result of the project will be a generically built process configurator for such use cases. Thus, a process model is set up that can be adapted and transferred to various fields of application. With this solution kit mobile and dynamic business processes can be implemented with based on Web Services.

Within this project C-LAB is responsible for the development of the system and technology base. Underlying technologies for this are Web Services, Peer-to-Peer technologies and ad-hoc communication.
This will extend and strengthen C-LAB's position in our competence domain Organic Computing in particular.

Project funded by: BMWi
Project duration: 10/2006 - 03/2010

Project partners: