SZTAKI's Engineering and Management Intelligence Research Laboratory (EMI) and Hitachi Research and Development Group have a decades-long collaboration – a recent landmark in this relationship saw EMI staff – including several COPROLOGS project members – visit two Hitachi facilities.
The Research Laboratory for Engineering and Management Intelligence at SZTAKI and the Hitachi Research and Development Group have been collaborating on applied research and development projects for many years. The subject of the research is typically real-world, practical problems, related to industrial production. Such as scheduling to adapt changes in manufacturing systems; increasing the transparency of manufacturing processes by using – sometimes incomplete or erroneous – extracted data.
The tasks usually originate from one of the Hitachi Group's production divisions, and SZTAKI researchers often draw on scientific knowledge not previously applied in industry to solve the problems. The relationship between SZTAKI and Hitachi has been very successful in recent years, as evidenced by a number of high-quality publications, patents and developments in industrial practice.
The visit of SZTAKI staff in July 2023 was made possible by the hosting of the IFAC World Congress 2023 in Yokohama. Both SZTAKI and the Hitachi Research and Development Group were represented at the conference with a number of presentations and sessions organised around a particular topic.
During the conference, SZTAKI staff visited Hitachi's "Kyōsō-no-Mori" R&D facility, which was opened a few years ago and is designed and operated with the active involvement of user communities in research, development and innovation activities as an important aspect. SZTAKI staff also visited the Hitachi Research and Development Group's research facility in Yokohama. The visit included an exchange of views on the partners' current research and development activities, key achievements and competencies, with Hitachi and SZTAKI, as well as the University of Michigan.