A Generic Plug & Produce System Composed of Semantic OPC UA Skills

Typical industrial workcells are composed of a plenitude of devices from various manufacturers, which rely on their own specific control interfaces. To reduce setup and reconfiguration times, a hardware-agnostic Plug & Produce system is required. In this paper, we present a system architecture that uses generic and semantically augmented OPC UA skills for robots, tools, and other system components. Standardized skill interfaces and parameters facilitate flexible component interchange and automatic parametrization with a focus on reusability of skills across different platforms and domains. The hierarchical composition of such skills allows for additional abstraction through the grouping of functionalities. Through the extension of OPC UA discovery services, available skills are dynamically detected whenever a manufacturing system's component is updated. The introduced Plug & Produce system is evaluated in multiple industrial workcells composed of robots, tool changer, electric parallel gripper, and vacuum gripper-all controlled via the proposed OPC UA skill interface. The evaluation of our system architecture demonstrates the applicability of the Plug & Produce concept in the domain of robot-based industrial assembly. Although it is necessary to adapt existing hardware to comply with the semantic skill concept, the initial one-time effort yields reoccurring efficiency gains during system reconfiguration. In particular, small lot production benefits from reduced changeover times

Agent-based reconfiguration in a micro-flow production cell

The world is moving towards to the fourth industrial revolution, usually linked with the Industrie 4.0 initiative, enables the digitization of manufacturing factories by using Cyber-Physical Systems and emergent technologies like Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The seamless reconfiguration of these complex industrial cyber-physical systems is an important challenge for the complete implementation of this revolution, being necessary to re-think the way such mechanisms can be designed and engineered. This paper presents an agentbased reconfiguration system for the dynamic and seamless reconfiguration of a physically-reconfigurable modular micro-flow production system in the area of manufacturing of aerospace engine components.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Towards a real-time capable plug & produce environment for adaptable factories

Industrial manufacturing is currently undergoing a transformation from mass production with inflexible production systems to individual production with adaptable cells. In order to ensure this adaptability of these systems, technologies such as plug & produce are needed, to integrate, modify and remove devices at runtime. Therefor an exact description of the system, the products and the capabilities / skills of the devices is essential as well as a network for communication between the devices. Deterministic data transmission is particularly important for distributed control systems. We propose an architecture for plug & produce mechanisms with hard real-time capable communication paths between the cyber-physical components using OPC UA PubSub over TSN and the ability to load and execute real-time critical tasks at runtime

RealCaPP – Real-time capable plug & produce for distributed robot-based automation

Due to the 4th Industrial Revolution, the industry is currently undergoing a transition from mass production to individual production, where each product is unique. This change in production means that it is no longer possible to design and develop the entire production plant, then build the system and produce the products. It may happen that a product is not yet known at the time when the plant is planned or realized. Therefore, flexible production facilities are needed to realize this transformation of production. Plug & Produce is a technique used for the realization of flexible production plants. Similar to the Plug & Play approach known from USB devices, for example, where devices are simply plugged in and can then be used. Plug & Produce is attempting to implement this approach for industrial components. Plug & Produce is a technique for quickly integrating production resources into systems and thus being able to produce quickly with these new resources. Production can be flexibly designed through the rapid integration or exchange of new production resources. The central result of this thesis is the development of a Real-Time Capable Plug & Produce (RealCaPP) architecture. This architecture makes it possible to add and exchange new production resources to a production system. To react quickly to new processes by adapting the software, and to execute these processes in real time distributed across multiple compute nodes. In order to quickly integrate new resources into the production system, a resource self-introduction mechanism has been developed. For this purpose, standardized self-descriptions were defined in a machine-readable form, describing the properties and skills of a resource. These descriptions are aggregated and merged into a global knowledge base of the system. This data can be used, for example, to automatically find plant configurations for specific tasks. Another important point is the exchange of data between product resources. Since process information must be exchanged between real-time-critical processes, the communication must also be realtime-capable. Therefore, a dynamic real-time communication platform was developed that can cope with changing resources and exchange process data in real-time. A real-time service architecture was developed for flexible process adaptation. Modular software components, so-called Real-Time Service (RTS), enable the implementation of resource skills (Basic Skills) and can be combined to form more complex skills (Composed Skills). These RTSs can be easily added to a system at runtime and executed afterwards. They can also be executed in a distributed manner. All these points were evaluated on two robotic cells for different case studies. It was shown that the same services used to screw aluminium profiles could also be reused to operate a portafilter coffee machine with a robot

Towards Logistics 4.0: A Skill-Based OPC UA Communication between WMS and the PLC of an Automated Storage and Retrieval System

In order to bring intralogistics systems to the same level of interoperability as today’s modern production systems, logistics must take the essential steps towards Industry 4.0. This requires an increasing abstraction level of control logic as an enabler for horizontal and vertical integration. The abstraction will lead to the interconnection of manufacturing and logistics control with the production planning and warehouse management systems (WMS). A main enabler for these communication paths are service-oriented architectures (SoA). OPC UA has established itself as a widely used and already adopted SoA-based communication standard in industry. The paper describes the realization of an OPC UA-based approach for the communication between a WMS and a PLC of an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS). The conceptual basis of communication design are skills of the ASRS. The work is supported by an architectural design with a subsequent prototypical implementation

Plug & Produce robot assistants as shared resources:A simulation approach

Plug and produce robot assistants have been developed to support flexible automation in smart factories as a shared resource on the shop floor. However, although the technology is reaching commercial maturity, there is still a scarcity of methods to support analysing their implementation feasibility, making it difficult to evaluate their use in real-world operations. In this study, we propose an approach that combines physical experiments and hybrid simulation to support analysing the feasibility and viability of operating plug and produce robot assistants before making considerable investments and without disturbing the running production. The applicability and usefulness of this new approach have been demonstrated through an in-depth case study conducted in a large manufacturing company. The results show that the approach supports verifying, analysing and improving the operation of plug and produce robot assistants as shared resources in dynamic production environments

A Capability and Skill Model for Heterogeneous Autonomous Robots

Teams of heterogeneous autonomous robots become increasingly important due to their facilitation of various complex tasks. For such heterogeneous robots, there is currently no consistent way of describing the functions that each robot provides. In the field of manufacturing, capability modeling is considered a promising approach to semantically model functions provided by different machines. This contribution investigates how to apply and extend capability models from manufacturing to the field of autonomous robots and presents an approach for such a capability model

Skills Composition Framework for Reconfigurable Cyber-Physical Production Modules

While the benefits of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are well-known, there are still challenges to their development, including, among others, a modular software architecture that enables rapid reconfiguration without much reprogramming effort. Skill-based engineering improves software modularity and increases the reconfiguration potential of RMS. Nevertheless, a skills' composition framework with a focus on frequent and rapid software changes is still missing. The Behavior trees (BTs) framework is a novel approach, which enables intuitive design of modular hierarchical control structures. BTs have been mostly explored from the AI and robotics perspectives, and little work has been done in investigating their potential for composing skills in the manufacturing domain. This paper proposes a framework for skills' composition and execution in skill-based reconfigurable cyber-physical production modules (RCPPMs). It is based on distributed BTs and provides good integration between low-level devices' specific code and AI-based task-oriented frameworks. We have implemented the provided models for the IEC 61499-based distributed automation controllers to show the instantiation of the proposed framework with the specific industrial technology and enable its evaluation by the automation community

Kommunikation und Bildverarbeitung in der Automation

In diesem Open Access-Tagungsband sind die besten Beiträge des 11. Jahreskolloquiums "Kommunikation in der Automation" (KommA 2020) und des 7. Jahreskolloquiums "Bildverarbeitung in der Automation" (BVAu 2020) enthalten. Die Kolloquien fanden am 28. und 29. Oktober 2020 statt und wurden erstmalig als digitale Webveranstaltung auf dem Innovation Campus Lemgo organisiert. Die vorgestellten neuesten Forschungsergebnisse auf den Gebieten der industriellen Kommunikationstechnik und Bildverarbeitung erweitern den aktuellen Stand der Forschung und Technik. Die in den Beiträgen enthaltenen anschauliche Anwendungsbeispiele aus dem Bereich der Automation setzen die Ergebnisse in den direkten Anwendungsbezug