Obituary for Prof. Dieter Fichtner

On May 24, 2025, Professor Dr.-Ing. habil. Dieter Fichtner, the former Chair of Production Automation, Machining and Ablation Technology and temporary Director of the Institute of Production Engineering at TU Dresden, passed away on May 24, 2025.

Dieter Fichtner was born in Guben on the Lausitzer Neiße in 1940 and spent his childhood and youth in Kipsdorf in the Eastern Ore Mountains. From 1960 to 1966, he studied production engineering at the TUD Dresden University of Technology. He worked as a teaching and research assistant to Prof. Herbert Seidel for a further four years. From 1970 to 1974, he worked at VEB Fortschritt Landmaschinen in Neustadt/Saxony as head of the rationalization/production preparation department. This was followed by a further period as an assistant at the Production Engineering and Machine Tools Section of TU Dresden, which he successfully completed in 1978 as a Dr. Ing. He then worked as a Senior Academic Associate at the chair of Prof. Detlef Kochan and received his doctorate in 1987 as Dr. sc. techn. As a university lecturer for production technology/information processing, he represented this main field of work at the Faculty of Mechanical Science and Engineering at TU Dresden from 1987 to 1993. In 1993, he was appointed University Professor for Production Automation/Control Engineering at the Institute of Production Engineering. He held this position, which was expanded in 2002 to include machining and material removal technology, with the rededicated Chair of Production Automation, Machining and Material Removal Technology until 2005, also acting as Director of the Institute of Production Technology from 2002 to 2005. From 1996 to 2005, as successor to Professor Wolfgang Voelkner, he was also spokesman for the CIMTT Center of Production Engineering and Management. Even after his retirement, he supervised prospective doctoral students and guided them to a successful doctorate. He was tirelessly involved in the Friends of Dresden Machining and Ablation Technology, the Society for Applied Computer Science and as a member of the Friends and Sponsors of TU Dresden. His scientific legacy will be continued in today's Chair of Forming Manufacturing Technology.

We will keep him and his work in honorable memory.