German Edge Cloud (GEC) is presenting the “Digital Industrial Engineer” showcase, developed in collaboration with partners, at HANNOVER MESSE (Hall 16, Booth A16). The AI-supported solution at maturity level 3 (Opera-tional) supports industrial engineers in knowledge-intensive planning and decision-making processes in high-variant production environments. It thus addresses one of the most pressing challenges facing industry: the increasing loss of decision-relevant experiential knowledge, coupled with growing variant complexity and high quality requirements.
Industrial engineers are crucial to the stability of modern manufacturing. They de-velop work and test concepts, evaluate product changes, analyze disruptions, and ensure stable processes. Their experience and knowledge are essential for avoiding errors, identifying deviations at an early stage, and maintaining consist-ently high standards even with a wide variety of variants.
But it is precisely this knowledge-driven role that is under pressure. In the coming years, many experienced industrial engineers will reach retirement age, while qualified young talent is not entering the field at the same rate. A significant part of industrial engineering expertise is based on many years of experience and often on decision-making knowledge that is not fully documented. With each departure of an experienced specialist, there is a risk of a gradual loss of problem-solving and planning expertise. Especially in high-variant production environments, this knowledge becomes a critical factor for process stability, quality, and responsive-ness.
At the same time, the number of highly qualified foreign industrial engineers enter-ing the European labor market is increasing — but they often face significant lan-guage and documentation barriers. The “Digital Industrial Engineer” provides them with an AI-supported assistant that automatically makes technical terminology, process knowledge, and historical documents easy to understand and fully over-comes language barriers. This enables international experts to start working pro-ductively right away and contribute their expertise to production processes with-out delay.
Answer to skills shortages and knowledge loss
The “Digital Industrial Engineer” is the answer to these challenges. The focus is on the systematic digitization and structuring of industrial engineers’ knowledge — where it originates: in real production and planning situations.
In expert interviews, during the structured analysis of disruptions, ramp-ups, or product changes, and based on existing artifacts such as work plans, test con-cepts, or FMEA analyses, experiential and decision-making knowledge are cap-tured and prepared. The focus is particularly on decision-making logic, typical failure patterns, chains of causes, and proven countermeasures.
This knowledge is converted into standardized, scalable knowledge modules and linked to real production contexts, such as product variants, technologies, or revi-sion statuses. This creates a digital production memory that makes implicit rela-tionships transparent and establishes reproducible decision-making foundations.
Building on this, AI-supported analyses become possible based on the Vibe Cod-ing Engine of Anthropic’s Claude, which evaluates complex technical content in a structured manner and prepares it in a context-sensitive way. This provides in-dustrial engineers with context-specific decision support in knowledge-intensive planning and evaluation processes, while proven solution strategies remain sys-tematically available. In this way, individual experiential knowledge becomes a scalable corporate memory — with the “Digital Industrial Engineer” serving as an AI-supported assistance system.
Partners unite technologies to create an integrated AI assistance system
The showcase is being developed in collaboration with strong partners who con-tribute their respective domain expertise to the joint solution. German Edge Cloud is providing a core component for the solution with its ONCITE Digital Production System (DPS). ONCITE DPS structures and contextualizes production-related data, makes it AI-enabled, and thus provides the basis for the AI-supported assis-tance system.
The great2know knowledge platform integrated into GEC’s ONCITE platform forms the knowledge layer of the system. It captures and structures experiential and decision-making knowledge from real production and planning situations and transfers it to the digital production memory.
The third core component for implementing the showcase is Scheer PAS: a con-sistently process-oriented digitization platform that combines integration, automa-tion, orchestration, API management, and agent-based AI in a single solution. Thanks to the flexible process control of Scheer PAS, the proportion of rule-based and agent-based activities can be precisely adjusted, thus gradually building trust in AI-supported processes.
The interaction of these three software applications creates the “Digital Industrial Engineer.” With its high-variant electronics manufacturing, Limtronik provides the industrial pilot environment in which the AI assistance system is validated and developed at maturity level 3 under real-world conditions.
AI as a lever for sustainable engineering excellence
“With the ‘Digital Industrial Engineer,’ we are demonstrating how experiential knowledge, structured information, and AI can be combined to create a new level of decision support,”
explains Dieter Meuser, CEO of German Edge Cloud.
“Our goal is to secure the knowledge of experienced specialists within the company for the long term and to make engineering processes transparent, reproducible, and scalable.”
The “Digital Industrial Engineer” showcase will be demonstrated at HANNOVER MESSE 2026 at the German Edge Cloud booth (Hall 16, Booth A16) and at the Scheer Group booth (Hall 15, Booth E14).
