Detlef Zühlke

Detlef Zuehlke (born 1949 in Bad Pyrmont) is a German engineer and professor.

Zühlke studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at RWTH Aachen, worked and obtained his PhD in 1983 at the Machine Tools Laboratory (WZL) at Aachen’s university, RWTH in robot programming. In 1985, he joined German Lufthansa AG. There, he was most recently head responsible of the aircraft maintenance branche.

Since 1991, Zühlke is holder of the chair of Production Automation (pak) at the Technical University Kaiserslautern. There, he founded the Center for Human-Machine-Interaction (ZMMI) in 1998 which provides research and services in the area of the design of human-machine-systems for industrial applications.

Since 2009, he is heading the research area of Innovative Factory Systems at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) GmbH.

Zühlke is the main initiator of the technology initiative SmartFactory KL e.V. – the intelligent factory of the future - which was founded in 2005 with well-known partners from industry and science. In the first manufacturer-independent, European demonstration factory, technical infrastructures of everyday life and ideas from practical experience are explored and latest ICT technology is transferred into automation.

The transfer of the principle of the "Internet of Things" into factory environment is the main effort for every of his research areas, this means the "Factory of Things".

• 1998: Chair of Production Systems at Ruhr University Bochum (declined)
• 2002: Leader of the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing IITB in Karlsruhe in conjunction with a professorship for Interactive Realtime Systems at the University Karlsruhe (declined)

• 1983: Borchers Medal of the RWTH Aachen for an outstanding performance in his PhD thesis
• 2005: Association of German Engineers (VDI) – Medal of Honour for his merits in VDI/VDE-Society Measurement and Automatic Control (GMA)
• 2011: IFAC Outstanding Service Award
• 2013: For his outstanding scientific work in the field of industrial automation, he was awarded with a doctor honoris causa by the Hermann-Oberth-Faculty of the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (ULBS) .

• Chairman of the IFAC CC 4 on Mechatronics, Robotics and Components and member of the IFAC Technical Board
• 2002 - 2008: Chairman of the International Federation of Automatic Control - IFAC TC 4.5 on Human-Machine-Systems
• Chairman of the VDI/VDE-GMA Focusproject "Ambient Intelligence in Automation"
• Scientific coordinator of the USEWARE congress series

• Useware-Engineering für technische Systeme, Springer Verlag, 2004
• Der intelligente Versager - Das Mensch-Technik-Dilemma, Primus Verlag, 2005
• SmartFactoryKL – A Vision becomes Reality. Keynote Paper Moscow, 13th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing, 2009
• SmartFactory — Towards a factory-of-things, IFAC Annual Reviews in Control, Volume 34, 2010
• Model-Driven Development of Advanced User Interfaces, Springer Verlag, 2011