Kick-off Meeting of the ProTehnic – pilot project

HEIBus Project aims to develop new cooperation models between Companies and HEI’s. One of the proposed model is Expert level real life problem solving (EXPERT).  The idea is to create a well-defined framework that allows companies to access high level expertise that partners from European universities and companies have. This enables companies to bring complicated multidisciplinary problems to be solved by high level international experts. The proposed cooperation model is tested by pilot projects, which are running in two phases (the first three start in January 2018 and the last three in January 2018).

One of the first-round pilot projects is ProTehnic RLPS EXPERT Project; the company that proposed the project is ProTehnic SRL from Romania. The project topic  is focused on the development of new systems that implement IoT and lifecycle management in photovoltaic area. For this project the company wanted expertise in following areas: electronics, sensors, data acquisition, microcontrollers, actuators, control systems and embedded systems. The HEI experts come from Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania (TUCLUJ), University of Miskolc in Hungary (ME) and JAMK University of Applied Sciences in Finland (JAMK). The activities in the project are coordinated by a control group which consists of Lorand Kacso-Vidrean from ProTehnic, Jorma Matilainen from JAMK, Szabolcs Szávai from ME and Ciprian Lapusan from TUCLUJ.

The project started with a kick-off meeting in 22th of January 2018 at ProTehnic and on 23th of January 2018 at TUCLUJ in Cluj-Napoca. The project group consists of following experts:

    • ProTehnic: Lorand Kacso-Vidrean (Project manager) and Teodor Tiuca (Mechanical engineering),
    • TUCLUJ: Ciprian Lapusan (Mechatronics) and Ciprian Rad (Mechatronics)
    • ME: Bodnár István (Electrical engineering) and Wagner György (Informatics)
    • JAMK: Matti Mieskolainen (Electronics, IoT) and Veli-Matti Häkkinen (Electrical and automation).

The first day of the meeting at ProTehnic started with the presentation of the company. After the company presentation there were presentations of HEIBus WP4 and project topic. The rest of the day the group made planning of the project and discussing of the problem to be solved. During the second day at TUCLUJ the team focused on project work and to agree on next tasks and responsibilities.

The company representatives and the HEI experts concluded that these two days were a success in starting the project activities and defining new steps for implementation. All participants showed real interest in the project theme and in solving the company need.