The technologies leaving the research laboratory of CT China must, first and foremost, be “S.M.A.R.T.” — simple, maintenance-friendly, affordable, reliable, and timely to market (see p. 24). To perfectly align their projects with these criteria, Siemens experts seek out synergies — which they often find at prestigious Chinese universities. One such institution is Tongji University in Shanghai, which has comprehensive expertise in traffic technology. CT Research is working with Tongji in a project designed to gather traffic data. Here, researchers from CT’s Radio Access Technologies and Solutions group are focusing their mobile communications expertise on analyzing how individual mobile phone signals can be filtered out of the jumble of signals carried on today’s airwaves. Tongji University is currently working on finding a way to correlate the locations of the signals as accurately as possible with the road network. Its goal is to extract the exact movements of mobile phone users (anonymously, of course). Tongji and Siemens are highly satisfied with the initial test results.

Xi’an is the home of Xi’an Jiaotong University, which is another one of Siemens Corporate Technology’s most important cooperative partners in China. The venerable educational institution, which was founded in 1896, is working with the CT research team on development of the User Interface Machine (UIM). While CT China is developing algorithms for the automatic diagnosis of numerically-controlled machine tools, the university is responsible for the system’s knowledge base. The Institute’s work includes evaluating numerous engineering interpretations of parameters, such as the degree of wear associated with various components of a machine tool, before the Siemens team imports these values into the UIM database. This constantly enlarges the data pool that’s available to the system for interpreting the parameters.

Together with other Chinese universities, the Shanghai Jiaotong University assisted Siemens with a project called Automation for Life Sciences. Specifically, it performed market research to ascertain how interested industry is in this kind of technology. The development of the project’s biosensor platform is a good example of how the various institutions work together. Siemens took biosensor technology, which is already common in the medical sector, and adapted it for use in industry. In parallel, two Beijing research institutes, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, translated the theory into practice and produced the hardware, software, and finally the first platform prototypes. Initial pilot tests showed that this platform achieved ten times greater productivity than conventional processes. These outstanding results were due in large part to the Beijing University of Technology, which made it possible to get the biosensor prototype tested at pharmaceutical and biotech companies.