The Korea Herald reports that Korean electronics and automobile companies will work with Germany’s top engineering science institute on the development of new solutions to improve productivity, the Ministry of Information and Communication said yesterday.

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The Munich-based research group Fraunhofer Gesellschaft announced the opening of a research and development centre at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University yesterday, where it will dispatch 10 researchers from its German headquarters through 2008.


Under the four-year plan, the group will collaborate with Hyundai Motor Co., Samsung Heavy Industries and LG Electronics to develop a “virtual engineering system” intended to enable companies to design and review drawing-board experiments through computer graphics and simulations, theoretically reducing time wasted on prototypes.


Industry insiders believe the companies could save more than 100 billion won ($80 million) annually in manufacturing costs should the technological innovations be adopted as planned, the Korea Herald said.


“A virtual engineering system could cut the manufacturing time for automobiles and ships by 30 percent, while cutting the annual imports of virtual engineering solutions by 40 percent, which now reach 700 billion won annually,” said ministry official Lee Sang-jin.

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The ministry and Fraunhofer will invest 20 billion won and 8.9 billion won, respectively, in the four-year project. The state-run Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute will own the exclusive license to the results of research in Korea, while Fraunhofer will hold the same rights for research in Germany. The institute will collect 69 percent of license payments when the solutions are sold to third countries, reflecting the proportion of investment by the Korean government.