LAB CLUSTER FOR INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT

Industrial Engineering and Technology Management Engineering field is the active actor of the Industry 4.0 revolution. The process automation paradigm is moving into a new era of supporting simultaneously mass production and production on demand. Students, academics and practitioners must develop new skills for working and running projects with new tools in this dynamic environment.

The faculty of Technology Management at HIT – Holon Institute of Technology is teaching and training students at the Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree levels in the fields of management of technologies and industrial engineering.

In order to continuously fit the continuously updated needs of the industrial fabric in Israel and in the World, we have established and implemented a cluster of labs dealing each one in particular, and in the cluster as an integrated unit, with challenging and cutting-edge issues from teaching, research and collaboration perspectives. This cluster main goal is to promote teaching and research in Information Technologies used in the Industry 4.0. which is planned to form the nucleus of a center of excellence for Industry-Academia collaboration.

The cluster comprises four labs:

• IIoT - Industrial Automation and Internet of Things (IoT),
• BD - Big Data,
• BI - Business Intelligence,
• HF - Human Factors.

In the following section, we describe in some detail the IIoT and BI labs which are the most recent additions to the cluster and the main needs and purpose of the cluster.

For the presentation at the conference, we will also touch upon the characteristics of the BD and HF labs and the integration process of the 4 labs within the cluster.

IIoT lab researches focus on:

• Sensing, Control, Actuating technologies,
• Device to Device, Wireless, Mesh communication networks,
• Low-Cost Computing and Manufacturing,
• Quality and Safety in Industry,
• Project-Based Learning of Automation Systems.

In parallel, its teaching activities mainly relate to

• Computer Integrated Manufacturing,
• IoT [1].

More specifically, the IIoT lab emphases its actions on implementing low cost educational and production systems combining small robots (DoBot Magician) and Single Board Computer assemblies (Raspberry Pi).

The BI lab researches emphasis on Artificial Intelligence applications, mainly in the Data Science arena, and more specifically on:

• Data / Process Mining, Machine Learning,
• Language Processing,
• Knowledge Representation, Ontologies, Information Visualization,
• Data Quality / Quality in Information Systems,
• Project-Based Learning of Information Systems and Technologies.

Additionally, the BI lab teaching activities convert areas related to its researches:

• Analysis and design of databases,
• Business Intelligence Models,
• Quality Engineering for Information Technology,
• Digital Health.

The creation of the HIT Technology Management Faculty lab cluster was raised by significant developments in the faculty activities such as:

• Students` increasing interest in to carry out their final graduation projects in an academic framework and applied technological research in the domains investigated by each lab alone or overlapping [2]. Some of these projects have a strong potential for becoming industrial developments [3,4].
• International cooperation in research, teaching, and students mentoring.
• Enhancement of research, teaching and mentoring actions intersecting between the labs of the cluster and partners’ labs inside and outside HIT.