Behaviour and integration of service-oriented automation and production devices at the shop-floor

Automation and manufacturing systems are changing in the direction of cooperative ecosystems with heterogeneous entities. An important feature that should be considered is the vertical integration from the business needs down to the shop-floor where the real action takes place. This paper analyses the integration of shop-floor devices into the IT-enterprise but maintaining also a certain degree of independence in terms of behaviour. Service-oriented paradigm is used as the main backbone due its proven merits in the business levels and recently also in automation and production systems. In the provided example, high-level Petri nets (HLPN) demonstrate a set of useful features, namely the partial behaviour description and analysis and some parameters in the integration. The resulting application leads to an easy integration of autonomous devices in the IT-enterprise, taking especially in account the requirements of the shop-floor level.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of the EU IST FP6 project SOCRADES, the EU FP6 (I*PROMS), and the EC ICT FP7 project ‘Cooperating objects network of excellence’ (CONET) for their support

Parallelising multi-agent systems for high performance computing

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are seen as a promising technology to face the current requirements of large-scale distributed and complex systems, e.g., autonomous traffic systems or risk management. The application of MAS to such large scale systems, characterised by millions of distributed nodes, imposes special demanding requirements in terms of fast computation. The paper discusses the parallelisation of MAS solutions using larger-scale distributed High End Computing platforms as well as High Performance Computing as a suitable approach to handle the complexity associated to collaborative solutions for large-scale systems

Integração de sistemas de produção

Mestrado em Engenharia MecânicaVários trabalhos recentes sugerem arquitecturas orientadas a serviços (SOA) para a integração de sistemas de produção, no entanto ainda não existe um padrão e são poucas as aplicações práticas na indústria. A arquitectura orientada a serviços e em particular as suas implementações de Web Services são um tema de pesquisa actual na área da automação industrial. Fornecendo ferramentas independentes da plataforma e da linguagem de desenvolvimento, permitindo a descentralização de recursos e serviços. Neste trabalho são analisadas arquitecturas orientadas a serviços, implementações de Web Services e os seus standards SOAP, WSDL e UDDI com vista à sua utilização como padrão para sistemas de produção flexíveis, modulares, cooperativos e descentralizados. Neste trabalho foram desenvolvidas infra-estruturas informáticas para 3 casos de estudos com arquitecturas orientadas a serviços, envolvendo vários recursos industriais de transporte e de produção, com diferentes tipos de controladores industriais, incluindo PLC’s, CNC’s e manipuladores robóticos. Os resultados experimentais comprovam a validade e o potencial de aplicação da arquitectura proposta em ambiente industrial. ABSTRACT: Several recent works suggest service oriented architecture (SOA) for the integration of production systems, however a standard still doesn’t exist and few the practical applications in industry. The service oriented architecture and in particular its implementations by Web Services are a subject of current research in the area of the industrial automation. Supplying platform and development language independent tools, allowing the decentralization of resources and services. In this work the service oriented architecture, Web Services implementations and its standards SOAP, WSDL and UDDI are analyzed with sight to its use as standard for flexible, modular, cooperative and decentralized production systems. In this work informatics infrastructures for 3 cases studies were developed with service oriented architecture, involving several transport and production industrial resources, with different types of industrial controllers, including PLC's, CNC's and robotic manipulators. The experimental results prove the validity and the potential of application of the service oriented architecture in industrial environment