Audi’s production division will be holding its second Smart Factory hackathon at its Ingolstadt facility in October.

The goal for the students and young professionals that participate is to work out practical solutions for future production processes during the 25-hour event. Specialised knowledge will include IT, mathematics, business administration and communication design.

Participants in groups of three to five will take on real‑life tasks from the areas of production and logistics and, with the use of anonymised data sets, work out solutions and generate real application cases. Audi production and IT experts will be available on site for advice.

The tasks will focus on the key issues of big data, machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence.

“The goal of the hackathon is to jointly implement the prototypes that are developed in reality,” said competition organiser, Kathrin Schwinghammer.

Last year, 16 teams from all over the world took part and developed software solutions for the factory of the future. Audi said it was following up about two-thirds of the ideas and gradually integrating them in production in cooperation with the teams.

The winning team from Austria developed a system for container management that allows the automated recognition, counting and classification of transport containers. They are now implementing it together with their company as an Audi supplier.