The Management of Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems Using Efficient and Flexible Architectures

Industry and in particular the manufacturing-oriented sector has always been researched and innovated as a result of technological progress, diversification and differentiation among consumers' demands. A company that provides to its customers products matching perfectly their demands at competitive prices has a great advantage over its competitors. Manufacturing-oriented information systems are becoming more flexible and configurable and they require integration with the entire organization. This can be done using efficient software architectures that will allow the coexistence between commercial solutions and open source components while sharing computing resources organized in grid infrastructures and under the governance of powerful management tools.Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems, Open Source, Software Architectures, Grid Computing, Web-Based Management Systems

The Cyber Physical Implementation of Cloud Manufactuirng Monitoring Systems

AbstractThe rise of the industrial internet has been envisaged as a key catalyst for creating the intelligent manufacturing plant of the future through enabling open data distribution for cloud manufacturing. The context supporting these systems has been defined by Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) that facilitate data resource and computational functions as services available on a network. SOA has been at the forefront EU research over the past decade and several industrially implemented SOA technologies exist on the manufacturing floor. However it is still unclear whether SOA can meet the multi-layered requirements present within state-of-the-art manufacturing Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). The focus of this research is to identify the capability of SOA to be implemented at different execution layers present in a manufacturing CPS. The state-of-the-art for manufacturing CPS is represented by the ISA-95 standard and is correlated with different temporal analysis scales, and manufacturing computational requirements. Manufacturing computational requirements are identified through a review of open and closed loop machine control orientations, and continuous and discrete control methods. Finally the Acquire Recognise Cluster (ARC) SOA for reconfigurable manufacturing process monitoring systems is reviewed, to provide a topological view of data flow within a field level manufacturing SOA

Agent and cyber-physical system based self-organizing and self-adaptive intelligent shopfloor

The increasing demand of customized production results in huge challenges to the traditional manufacturing systems. In order to allocate resources timely according to the production requirements and to reduce disturbances, a framework for the future intelligent shopfloor is proposed in this paper. The framework consists of three primary models, namely the model of smart machine agent, the self-organizing model, and the self-adaptive model. A cyber-physical system for manufacturing shopfloor based on the multiagent technology is developed to realize the above-mentioned function models. Gray relational analysis and the hierarchy conflict resolution methods were applied to achieve the self-organizing and self-adaptive capabilities, thereby improving the reconfigurability and responsiveness of the shopfloor. A prototype system is developed, which has the adequate flexibility and robustness to configure resources and to deal with disturbances effectively. This research provides a feasible method for designing an autonomous factory with exception-handling capabilities

Service-oriented control architecture for reconfigurable production systems

Evolvable and collaborative production systems are becoming an emergent paradigm towards flexibility and automatic re-configurability. The reconfiguration of those systems requires the existence of distributed and modular control components that interact in order to accomplish control activities. This paper focuses on service-oriented production systems, which behavior is regulated by the coordination of services that are provided and required by control components with different roles. Internally, these components are independent of the implementations, but an internal modular and event based structure is presented. Individual control and interaction is achieved by using embedded or inter-service control processes for which High-Level Petri Nets are proposed. Supporting the predefined control, decision support systems are used to provide conflict resolution and other decision-making functions

Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems

Providing an appropriate level of accessibility and traceability to data or process elements (so-called Items) in large volumes of data, often Cloud-resident, is an essential requirement in the Big Data era. Enterprise-wide data systems need to be designed from the outset to support usage of such Items across the spectrum of business use rather than from any specific application view. The design philosophy advocated in this paper is to drive the design process using a so-called description-driven approach which enriches models with meta-data and description and focuses the design process on Item re-use, thereby promoting traceability. Details are given of the description-driven design of big data systems at CERN, in health informatics and in business process management. Evidence is presented that the approach leads to design simplicity and consequent ease of management thanks to loose typing and the adoption of a unified approach to Item management and usage.Comment: 10 pages; 6 figures in Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT-BDCS 2015), Singapore July 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5764, arXiv:1402.575

Maintenance management and operational support as services in reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Emergent architectures and paradigms targeting reconfigurable manufacturing systems increasingly rely on intelligent models to maximize the robustness and responsiveness of modern installations. Although intelligent behaviour significantly minimizes the occurrence of faults and breakdowns it does not exclude them nor can prevent equipment’s normal wear. Adequate maintenance is fundamental to extend equipments’ life cycle. It is of major importance the ability of each intelligent device to take an active role in maintenance support. This paper proposes a maintenance architecture supporting maintenance teams’ management and offering contextualized operational support. All the functionalities hosted by the architecture are offered to the remaining system as network services. Any intelligent module, implementing the services’ interface, can report diagnostic, prognostic and maintenance recommendations that enable the core of the platform to decide on the best course of action

Dpws middleware to support agent-based manufacturing control and simulation

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn present manufacturing systems, the current challenge is the development of highly reconfigurable, truly distributed solutions. The tendency is to build manufacturing systems with autonomous, intelligent and distributed components that will support reconfiguration and adaptability. The most promising paradigms for the implementation of such systems are multi-agents and service oriented architectures (SOA), mainly over the DPWS (Device Profile for Web Services) implementation which was aimed at devices. An important limitation of most current multi-agent systems is that the management system is not totally distributed. Failure in the agent responsible for the registry can overthrow the entire system. DPWS does not have this limitation, since the management system is totally distributed. However, DPWS does not support agent autonomy notions as efficiently. The possibility of creating a truly distributed multi-agent system by linking both approaches led to this thesis. A Middleware layer was developed that enables agents to benefit from DPWS functionalities in order to reach the proposed goal. This middleware layer joins agents, databases, hardware, simulators, human interface applications such as production system management, error correction and maintenance, etc. To prove this concept a 3D model of an agent controlled manufacturing system with transporters augmented with DPWS communication interfaces was developed

Towards a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud through Operable Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines

In last decade, the paradigm of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has integrated industrial manufacturing systems with Cloud Computing technologies for Cloud Manufacturing. Up to 2015, there were many CPS-based manufacturing systems that collected real-time machining data to perform remote monitoring, prognostics and health management, and predictive maintenance. However, these CPS-integrated and network ready machines were not directly connected to the elements of Cloud Manufacturing and required human-in-the-loop. Addressing this gap, we introduced a new paradigm of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) that bridges a gap between physical machines and virtual space in 2017. CPMC virtualizes machine tools in cloud through web services for direct monitoring and operations through Internet. Fundamentally, CPMC differs with contemporary modern manufacturing paradigms. For instance, CPMC virtualizes machining tools in cloud using remote services and establish direct Internet-based communication, which is overlooked in existing Cloud Manufacturing systems. Another contemporary, namely cyber-physical production systems enable networked access to machining tools. Nevertheless, CPMC virtualizes manufacturing resources in cloud and monitor and operate them over the Internet. This dissertation defines the fundamental concepts of CPMC and expands its horizon in different aspects of cloud-based virtual manufacturing such as Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines. Digital Twin (DT) is another evolving concept since 2002 that creates as-is replicas of machining tools in cyber space. Up to 2018, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art DTs, which only focused on monitoring production lifecycle management through simulations and data driven analytics. But they overlooked executing manufacturing processes through DTs from virtual space. This dissertation identifies that DTs can be made more productive if they engage directly in direct execution of manufacturing operations besides monitoring. Towards this novel approach, this dissertation proposes a new operable DT model of CPMC that inherits the features of direct monitoring and operations from cloud. This research envisages and opens the door for future manufacturing systems where resources are developed as cloud-based DTs for remote and distributed manufacturing. Proposed concepts and visions of DTs have spawned the following fundamental researches. This dissertation proposes a novel concept of DT based Virtual Production Lines (VPL) in CPMC in 2019. It presents a design of a service-oriented architecture of DTs that virtualizes physical manufacturing resources in CPMC. Proposed DT architecture offers a more compact and integral service-oriented virtual representations of manufacturing resources. To re-configure a VPL, one requirement is to establish DT-to-DT collaborations in manufacturing clouds, which replicates to concurrent resource-to-resource collaborations in shop floors. Satisfying the above requirements, this research designs a novel framework to easily re-configure, monitor and operate VPLs using DTs of CPMC. CPMC publishes individual web services for machining tools, which is a traditional approach in the domain of service computing. But this approach overcrowds service registry databases. This dissertation introduces a novel fundamental service publication and discovery approach in 2020, OpenDT, which publishes DTs with collections of services. Experimental results show easier discovery and remote access of DTs while re-configuring VPLs. Proposed researches in this dissertation have received numerous citations both from industry and academia, clearly proving impacts of research contributions

Service-oriented agents for collaborative industrial automation and production systems

Service-oriented Multi-Agent Systems (SoMAS) is an approach to combine the fundamental characteristics of service-oriented and multi-agent methods into a new platform for industrial automation. Several research works already targeted the connection of these technologies, presenting different perspectives in how and why to join them. This research focuses on available efforts and solutions in the area of SoMAS and explains the idea behind the service-oriented agents in industrial automation. A SoMAS system is mainly composed by shared resources in form of services and their providing/requesting agents. The paper also discusses the required engineering aspects of these systems, from the internal anatomy to the interaction patterns. Parameters of flexibility, reconfiguration, autonomy and reduced development efforts were considered and they should be the trademark of SoMAS. Aiming to illustrate the proposed approach, an example of service-oriented automation agents is given.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of the EU IST FP6 project “Service-Oriented Cross-layer infrastructure for Distributed smart Embedded devices” (SOCRADES), the EU FP6 "Network of Excellence for Innovative Production Machines and Systems” (I*PROMS), and the EC ICT FP7 project “Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence” (CONET) for their support