Mr. Detlef Zühlke

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. h.c. Detlef Zuehlke received the MS in electrical engineering and computer sciences and his PhD in robotics both from RWTH Aachen/Germany. Until his retirement in 2018 he was Professor for Production Automation at the University of Kaiserslautern and Director of the research department Innovative Factory Systems (IFS) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). From 2005 to 2019 he also served as the  executive chairman of the SmartFactoryKL a non-profit research association and worldwide pioneer in smart manufacturing. His research interest is in industrial control architectures, factory planning and operation and human- machine-systems for industrial applications. He is the pioneer of the Industry 4.0 paradigm and paved the path into this new era by many groundbreaking contributions.