Production-related competencies and skills are and will remain an important
compound of countries’ economic development and growth as well as industries’
long-term competitiveness. Good qualifications are also the decisive factor for
prosperity and advancement on a personal level. Solutions must be quickly found
for approaching the mismatch of institutional qualification programs and actual
market requirements. On the one hand, the future workforce must be qualified for
current employment opportunities, while on the other hand, today’s generation
needs to be enabled to keep up with competences required in the future
Learning factories offer a promising environment to address the challenges
mentioned above in education and training and also in research on process-oriented
improvement in production. While numerous learning factories have been built in
industry and academia in the last decade, a comprehensive scientific overview
of the topic is still missing.
This book intends to close this gap by reviewing the current state of research and
practice on the subject of learning factories. In addition, it gives the reader an
overview of existing learning factories, their hardware, their didactic, and their
operating concept.
We are convinced that learning factories can play an important role in the
excellence of future generations of engineers and production employees.