Excursion to the Bitburger Brewery Group as part of the DaBe project

The visit focused on the final presentations by students from the 2025 summer semester and a tour of the production facilities at Bitburger Braugruppe GmbH. The excursion offered participants exciting insights into modern production processes and process landscapes.

The DaBe project aims to develop a practice-oriented course in which students of technical disciplines experience the interaction of hardware and software in the context of data science problems. The central basis for this is a cyber-physical research brewery at TU Dortmund University, where students gain practical experience of how hands-on retrofitting and the networking of technical systems work. The brewery serves as a living demonstrator and is incrementally developed by the students according to their own ideas. The course does not start from scratch every semester, but rather achieves a long-term result and combines theoretical knowledge with the students' own ideas. This situation reflects typical industrial scenarios, in which existing systems are often retrofitted with intelligent technology and networked. The course thus also prepares students for sustainable measures for retrofitting plants. While they are dependent on the documentation of previous groups, they must also record their own work, thus learning first-hand the necessity of knowledge management and technical documentation.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to our colleagues at Bitburger Braugruppe GmbH for their hospitality and the inspiring insights they gave us into production at the Bitburger brewery.

We look forward to incorporating the impressions we gained into the further development of our course and working with our students to design innovative approaches to data-driven production.