Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH

The vehicle production in Zwickau consists of the usual production areas of body shop, paint shop and final vehicle assembly. The site also includes a pressing plant and competence centers for aluminum components and special vehicle construction. A high-performance pilot center is used for series preparation and support. The last combustion engine vehicle rolled off the production line on June 26, 2020. Since the founding of the site in 1990, more than 6 million vehicles have left the factory halls.

The vehicle production in Zwickau consists of the usual production areas of body shop, paint shop and final vehicle assembly. The site also includes a pressing plant and competence centers for aluminum components and special vehicle construction. A high-performance pilot center is used for series preparation and support. The last combustion engine vehicle rolled off the production line on June 26, 2020. Since the founding of the site in 1990, more than 6 million vehicles have left the factory halls.

The vehicles of the future will be more connected, more intelligent and, above all, more sustainable. In this transformation, the Gläserne Manufaktur Dresden not only represents a production site for electric vehicles, but also sees itself as a transparent showcase for the Volkswagen brand and an ambassador for the mobile future.  Currently, 35 ID.3s roll off the production line in Dresden every day.

Volkswagen Saxony (VWS) is intensively pursuing the goal of producing its fully electric vehicles in Zwickau and Dresden in a CO2-neutral manner. In 2019, the Transparent Factory Dresden (with the abbreviation in German being GMD) was the first Volkswagen brand location to produce carbon neutral vehicles when only considering the energy used by the assembly line. Reducing the carbon footprint of a company also plays an important role away from the manufacturing process. Another long-term goal is to control the building services of the Transparent Factory in a forward-looking, demand-oriented, and intelligent manner to further improve the carbon footprint of the production site.

As a starting point, more than 300 environmental sensors were installed in the GMD as part of a multi-stage pilot project to measure temperature, humidity, and air pressure continuously and comprehensively. The recorded environmental data was processed and visualised in dashboards to create data transparency enabling initial energy-related conclusions. The plan for the next stage includes using the measured data to make suggestions for intelligent operation of the building management system (BMS). In the future, the intelligent control system will be able to work more predictively and according to demand by using AI. This will make reaching the goal of total carbon neutrality more realistic.

The pilot project was successfully completed and provides evidence that the entire process from the collection of environmental data to its visualisation can be mapped in meaningful, easy-to-understand dashboards.

A comprehensive data collection and visualisation concept was created for the customer, which at the same time serves as a valuable basis for further and extensive evaluations. The integration of further data sources (e.g. weather data or forecasts, hours of sunshine, ...) is also possible to take external factors into account, e.g. the temperatures within the production line. The infrastructure created enables the data to be evaluated/analysed in addition to pure visualisation (e.g. to create forecasts, generate alerts, etc.). Combined with intelligent control of the building services, the Transparent Factory Dresden can finally take a big step towards proactive and climate-neutral production.