About me

Computer scientist by passion

Hello and welcome

me

My name is Josef Prinz.

I am a software developer, based in Berlin, Germany. The main focus of my programming are developments for production and automation planning in the areas of simulation, optimization and data standards. My passion and enthusiasm for computer science have driven me for more than 40 years now. For 36 years I was an employee of inpro in Berlin. I am very grateful for this time, the meetings with many dedicated and inspiring people there and the opportunities to work on many highly interesting and innovative projects. I really enjoy being able to give free rein to my creativity and solve challenges. I started my professional life in 1980 at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics and developments for the simulation of material flow systems. To this day, the network of outstanding scientists and visionaries that the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft represents is of great importance to my research and development activities.

I would also like to emphasize my involvement in the AutomationML Association. In this association, ambitious technical experts have come together under the technical leadership of Professor Dr. Rainer Drath to cut the Gordian knot of incompatibility of automation engineering systems by creating a standardized and neutral data exchange format. Today AutomationML is a worldwide respected standard and I am proud to have contributed to it with my developments such as the AutomationML Editor.

I developed my first simulation program 45 years ago at the University of Dortmund, the simulation of a telephone directory assistance written in the programming language Simula. Simula was developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard in the 1960s at the Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Center) at the University of Oslo to perform simulations of processes on the computer. A great programming language, the first object-oriented programming language, model for other languages like Smalltalk or C++. Many of the language concepts introduced in Simula are still present in modern object-oriented programming languages. With the beginning of the winter semester 1977 in Dortmund, we were the first pure computer science program, computer science pioneers, so to speak. The developmental advances in hardware and software since those early years have been and continue to be rapid.

My passion for computer science will not diminish in the future, at most the intensity of the work, now that my professional time has come to an end. On this page I present some of the projects I have been working on recently, which will remain my interest in the future. I would like to share my years of experience especially with AutomationML but not only with others in the future. Questions can be forwarded via the AutomationML GitHub pages or directly to me Josef Prinz.

I don’t want to exclude that something new will be added to these pages when I want to implement a creative idea again.