The IPS at IFAC 2026 in Busan, South Korea

As part of the conference, René Wöstmann and David Wagstyl organised an open invited track on the topic of ‘The Role of Interoperability and Standards in Realising Digital Twins for Sustainable and Digital Manufacturing Transformation’. At the event, this track was chaired by David Wagstyl, with Felix Terschluse acting as co-chair.
Christian Koch, David Wagstyl and Felix Terschluse presented a total of four research papers, which were produced in close collaboration with the RIF Institute for Research and Transfer e.V. The papers presented met with great interest and sparked an in-depth technical discussion:

• Maturity Model for Technical Documentation for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises
• Knowledge-Driven Digital Twin Architecture for Semantic Rule Integration in the Process Industry
• Ontology-Driven Semantic Integration of Industrial Data into Knowledge Graphs for Digital Twin Applications
• Six Sigma, Quo Vadis? A Retrospective and the Path to Sustainable Intelligent Optimization in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The conference also provided a valuable opportunity for international networking. This enabled new contacts to be forged with researchers from England, Portugal and France, and potential avenues for future collaboration to be discussed.
Even beyond our own track, IFAC 2026 provided a wealth of inspiration for research at the IPS. Of particular interest were presentations on the use of ontologies as a knowledge base for digital twins and for human-robot collaboration, as well as on the digitalisation of algae cultivation. As the IPS is also active in these fields, the insights gained opened up important perspectives for future research work.
We would like to thank everyone involved for the stimulating exchange and look forward to incorporating these new ideas into future projects.