Holistic approach for teaching IT skills in a production environment

Increasing digitalization of manufacturing leads to new competence requirements for mechanical engineers. In recent years, learning factories have proven to be the ideal learning concept for acquiring skills. However, the teaching of IT skills is missing in the current training courses. Therefore, this paper will present a holistic approach in form of a learning factory module, starting from the conception and development right up to the operation of a Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) in the production environment. Within the training module, the participants will have to develop a Cyber-Physical-Production-System (CPPS) for an assembly line. The participants are trained how to select the hardware and software components for a modular, decentralized and transferable solution in four consecutive learning units. In each unit, the selected technologies will be combined to a web-technology-based prototype, which is then tested in the real world environment of the LPS-learning factory.