Biological Transformation in Production

Nature provides a multitude of prominent templates for technical innovations. Beyond pure bionics, developments, such as smart systems, digitization of production and Industry 4.0 in general, are enabling the basis for a much more comprehensive trend: biological transformation.

The systematic application and combination of processes, principles and materials from nature creates an innovation drift into a new era. Bio-intelligent systems, as the next stage of transformation, rely on a fusion of biology and IT. The first manifestations are already evident in the field of machine learning. For production systems, this offers particular potential for increasing resilience and resource efficiency.

In this expert lecture, the concept of biological transformation for production will be explained and illustrated with examples in different aspects of bio-inspiration, bio-integration and bio-intelligence. Due to changing incentive systems, biological transformation has an influence on all areas of value creation and contributes to more sustainability through, for example, green economy or recycling management. New algorithms enable the control of complex systems, but also pose new challenges for approval procedures, for example, if a deterministic behavior in production systems is influenced by biologically-inspired systems.