ATB Institute for Applied Systems Technology Bremen GmbH
Bremen - Germany
ATB Institute for Applied Systems Technology Bremen GmbH, located in Bremen (Germany), was founded in 1991 and has the status of a non-profit organisation. The shareholders of ATB are the State of Bremen and a group of important industrial companies. Among others, ATB shareholders are DaimlerChrysler, DASA, STN ATLAS Elektronik, Bremer Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft and also a number of SMEs that are located in the region of Bremen. ATB has established a research team of 16 scientists which is supported by about 20 employees working on a temporary or part-time basis. ATB operates on the basis of a quality management system, which is fully compliant with ISO 9000.
The main strategic business areas of ATB are Systems Analysis & Design, Quality Management and Software Systems Technology. One basic objective of ATB is to apply system technology methods and tools in order to improve the quality and efficiency of processes in various application areas. Special emphasis is given to the improvement of software engineering processes. The general concept of ATB is to establish in close co-operation with its industrial partners a well balanced application-oriented research, which should result both in solving the specific problems of the partners, and in contributing to the further development of system technology sciences.
Within the area of Systems Analysis & Design, ATB is supporting manufacturing companies to improve their business processes. ATB has developed and successfully applied the methodology for factory improvement based on the so-called ‘best enterprise practice’ (BEP) approach, which includes elaborated concepts implying organisational and technical solutions for quality and production control problems. This BEP methodology for business process re-engineering and exploitation of ICT tools, especially in SMEs, enables the efficient generation of key implementation plans to overcome the identified bottlenecks in companies in different industrial sectors. In the scope of several EC-funded projects (DonQ-CIM, IMPLACE, QSHOP, DonQ-SPI), as well as a number of industrial projects BEP has been applied successfully in about 25 SMEs and larger companies in different European regions in order to improve manufacturing processes.
ATB has been working for several years in the area of TQM on the following topics: Information system for QC in car assembly, Quality oriented system for monitoring production systems, Quality oriented shop-floor information system for car recycling, Cost-effective preparation for ISO 9000 certification, QA for overseas shipping of cars etc. In the area of quality, production planning and shop-floor control systems, ATB has gained its expertise through a number of application oriented projects in the automotive industry and other industrial sectors, as well as for planning/control of production processes in public service organisations. In the scope of the ESPRIT project QUETA, ATB has developed two tools: one for identification of the reasons of problems in manufacturing processes (especially in small batch manufacturing and assembly) and one for the generation of action plans to eliminate these reasons. ATB has gained high experience in the development of the knowledge based systems and application of statistical methods in the quality domain and enterprise wide information integration based on the AIT platform and CORBA architecture. Further more, ATB has developed the BQM methodology for the efficient implementation of QM systems within SMEs. BQM has successfully been applied to about 70 SMEs in the region of North Germany.
About one third of ATB´s annual turnover is realised in the business area of Software Systems Technology and the Exploitation of ICT tools. Within this business area, ATB has gained a very good overview concerning the enormous variety of software best practice methods and ICT tools available on the market. ATB is applying and gathering experience in these advanced software-engineering technologies in the scope of developing application-specific software systems and software products for industrial customers. ATB has sound expertise with respect to the implementation of interactive www-based information services. ATB is developing SW systems applying: Modelling Methodologies and languages: UML 1.1, OMT, SSADM, eEPK; Development Environments: MS Visual C++, JAVA - Visual Café, Oracle Developer Tools, MS Visual Basic, Elements Environment; Database Management Systems: Oracle RDBMS, MS SQLServer, MS Access.
In reference to the sound background of ATB on development methodologies, quality assurance, system-theoretical and technical background, ATB also advanced as a key consultant to support the project-control of large development ICT-projects in the area of civil-services (fire-department, postal-service), responsible for project management aspects, quality control, configuration management, acceptance tests procedures etc.
ATB is acting as a node for the northern part of Germany in the scope of the EC ESPINODE campaign. In this project, industrial companies are supported to carry out software process improvement activities. Within this project ATB has established strong contacts with a large number of software systems vendors and end-user, especially SMEs. ATB is also responsible for co-ordinating the European ESPINODE network (18 regional nodes established Europe-wide).
Based on the long-term experience of its senior staff members, ATB is heading and managing large industrial, national and European research projects. ATB is taking over for a variety of projects on the European and national level the task of proposal manager, and for various projects ATB is responsible for the project management or is handling the project management as subcontractor of the prime contractor. ATB´s infrastructure is well prepared for the successful cost and time efficient execution of these types of tasks.
Personnel:
Dr.-Ing. Uwe Kirchhoff: General Manager of the Institute for Applied System Technology – ATB-Bremen. 30 years of professional experience in basic research on human engineering topics, industrial and applied research experience in aircraft control, inertial navigation system technology, robotics, process and shop-floor control, as well as business process optimisation, acting at different responsibility levels. Working at the European Space Agency (ESTEC) responsible for space robotics technology development. Acting as evaluator and reviewer in the scope of the EU-Programme since 1985. More than 50 Publications.
Dr.-Ing. Dragan Stokic: More than 25 years experience in industrial and research projects on the control of robots, modelling and control of large-scale systems, flexible manufacturing systems, and aircrafts. Since 1991 Senior researcher at ATB Bremen, responsible for research on the application of ICT systems in production systems, as well as on enterprise modelling and design, the introduction of the best manufacturing practice etc. Project manager for several EC and ESA/ESTEC projects on process improvements issues. Local project manager of the QUETA project on the application of knowledge based systems in manufacturing companies. Evaluator and reviewer of a number of ESPRIT projects. Author and co-author of more than 100 papers. Co-author of three monographs and two textbooks, published by Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Dipl. Math. Thomas Beckmann: Studied Mathematics at the University of Bremen. Since 1998 he has been working at ATB-Bremen and is responsible for project management in several software development projects applying advanced software engineering methods & tools. His research topics are methodologies for optimising the software test process with respect to customer requirements.
Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Kuczynski: Studied electrical engineering at the University of Bremen. Since 1999 at ATB his main areas are robotics and automation technologies. His research topics are modelling of processes and deduction methods.
Dipl.-Ing. Michael Doerr: Studied mechanical engineering at the University of Bremen. From 1996 on he worked as a project leader in the developement departement of the cebacus Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH, Minden, in the two main fields software for analysing automobile accidents and CAD-applications. Since 2000 he is working at ATB-Bremen on topics related to diagnostics, reasoning and knowledge based systems.
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