With the largest research project in ten years, the Fraunhofer IML aims to help a decentralized and open platform economy achieve a breakthrough in Germany and Europe as an alternative to Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is a thing of the past: with the Silicon Economy, Fraunhofer IML wants to create an alternative to monopolistic platforms such as Amazon, Uber or Alibaba. Such a platform economy is the economic concept of the future - it is the only way to master increasingly complex supply chains. That is why Fraunhofer IML and its project partners will make all the results of the project available to all companies for free use as open source software via a development and operating platform.

"In the past, we automated machines; in the Silicon Economy, we are automating processes. The complete digitalization of process and supply chains with the help of artificial intelligence will usher in a new era in logistics. It feels like 30 years ago when the internet itself was developed. Business models in logistics will change fundamentally, new players and job profiles will emerge. The success story of the future Silicon Economy giants begins now. At the Fraunhofer IML and at the Dortmund site, we have gathered the know-how and the technologies to make essential parts of this new world a reality," emphasizes Prof. Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director of the Fraunhofer IML.

The work in the project pursues two parallel goals: firstly, the development of the Silicon Economy infrastructure and the necessary basic components, and secondly, the development of a platform including a user community. Specifically, an open source infrastructure as well as hardware and software components are being created that will be publicly available in a kind of digital library. This should enable companies of all sizes to digitize and automate all business processes along a supply chain.

To this end, the scientists involved work on specific logistical solutions in so-called development projects. Companies then implement selected technical components of these projects during ongoing operations. In this way, the researchers want to ensure applicability for companies at an early stage. The project partners then make the general findings of these specific solutions available in the form of hardware and software components in the digital library.

The Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is funding the project over a period of three years with a total of around 25 million euros. In addition to the Fraunhofer IML, the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST and the Technical University of Dortmund are also project partners.