Students at Munich University of Applied Sciences are paving the way for digitization in municipal used clothing collection and enabling plannable recycling with the help of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.
As part of a student consulting project of the Co-Innovation Lab at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, an interdisciplinary team of students developed a holistic concept for emptying used clothing containers at the Abfallwirtschaftsbetrieb München (AWM) in line with demand. The aim was to optimize the previously rigid emptying schedule, which takes into account the respective emptying requirements of the containers, and thus to improve the quality of the clothing and make more efficient use of existing resources. The focus was thus on moving toward digitization with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT), thereby creating data-based, demand-driven planability with a digital planning tool.
The team consisted of students from three degree programs at Munich University of Applied Sciences and was divided into a consulting team consisting of Mahboob Elahi Noor, Gilbert Muhumuza and Marlene Piper and a development team consisting of industrial engineering students Agnesa Xhemaili, Majlinda Sllamniku and Stefan An. Prof. Dr. Holger Günzel and Prof. Dr. Olav Hinz assisted the team as coaches.
The client Rudolph Schmid (department head of bulky waste and depot container collection AWM) was impressed by the solution that was finally presented: “From the department’s point of view, all requirements for the project, which was presented in an exciting presentation, were exceeded.”