Interview with Prof. Michael ten Hompel

Prof. ten Hompel, the Social Networked Industry was already the main topic of the 2017 Future Logistics Congress. In the past years, the focus has been increasingly on artificial intelligence and open source. How do these topics belong together? 

In 2017, we said that we were heading towards a world in which humans and machines would work together as partners in social networks. We called this new world “Social Networked Industry” and presented the results of the BMBF-funded project of the same name. 

Today we see that artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming an actively engaged partner of human beings. A social networked industry is developing in which AI not only provides information but is actively taking on more and more controlling, negotiating or planning tasks. This development was already foreseeable in 2017 – but the speed at which the change is taking place is still surprising, and logistics is once again in focus. As was said then: “Digitalization of everything and artificial intelligence in everything will change everything for us.”

At the same time, we recognize that no company or institute is large enough to face this challenge by itself. This leads to the realization that the time of going it alone is over. For this reason, we initiated the company-financed Open Logistics Foundation. Its goal is to create an opensource ecosystem for logistics – in other words, a Linux for logistics and AI. The topics of Social Networked Industry, artificial intelligence and open-source technologies are therefore closely interlinked. I am convinced that one cannot exist without the other.

The 2023 Future Logistics Congress had the subtitle “Learning what we don’t understand.” What does this mean?

In logistics, we frequently deal with very long observation periods, multi-criteria optimization and complex systems. Here, artificial intelligence can help us to arrive at new solutions and control our systems better. In a way, this leads us to a new paradigm of learning, for example, when we feed a large quantity of data and practical knowledge to an AI and see what internal correlations can be learned from that. This knowledge can be used to generate new solutions, for example, for controlling a robot swarm, for the next batch in order picking or for planning a logistics system.

How will the interaction among Social Networked Industry, artificial intelligence and open source change future work?

First, it should be noted that the topic of artificial intelligence has already become established in the industry. 100 percent of the surveyed logistics specialists rate “data analytics & artificial intelligence” as important or very important to them. This topic will change large areas of the working world in the logistics sector: from scheduling, to inventory management, to the area of “embodied AI” – in other words, the “tangible” AI on the shop floor. In a few years, many physically demanding activities will be performed by intelligent, increasingly “humanoid” robots. Our evoBOT is already a small step in this direction. I am convinced that our AGVs will soon have arms. 

Artificial intelligence has been in the public eye at least since ChatGPT and is also perhaps the most radical megatrend of our time. Why is it so important to focus on AI now in the context of the Social Networked Industry?

New markets for AI-based applications are now developing, and I am convinced that the ones that meaningfully combine data, knowledge and context with each other will win. This “triangular AI³” is also the central topic of our new Lamarr Institute. At the institute, we are working on the basis for a new AI generation together with the TU Dortmund University, the University of Bonn and Fraunhofer IAIS. For this purpose, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) Ministry for Culture and Science are funding eleven new professorships and over 100 jobs in science.  

Now industry is also called on. If a company wants to open up new markets in this area, considerable investments are necessary. Most developments no longer occur behind closed doors but in large development communities – many of them on an open-source basis, as was the case with ChatGPT as well. However, the open-source area also requires active engagement and investment. Microsoft and co. realized this a long time ago and are investing millions to secure future markets for themselves. Anyone who wants to play now has to leave the spectator seats and go onto the field.