1,196 research outputs found

    Enabling Communication Technologies for Automated Unmanned Vehicles in Industry 4.0

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    Within the context of Industry 4.0, mobile robot systems such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one of the major areas challenging current communication and localization technologies. Due to stringent requirements on latency and reliability, several of the existing solutions are not capable of meeting the performance required by industrial automation applications. Additionally, the disparity in types and applications of unmanned vehicle (UV) calls for more flexible communication technologies in order to address their specific requirements. In this paper, we propose several use cases for UVs within the context of Industry 4.0 and consider their respective requirements. We also identify wireless technologies that support the deployment of UVs as envisioned in Industry 4.0 scenarios.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

    IDARTS – Towards intelligent data analysis and real-time supervision for industry 4.0

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    The manufacturing industry represents a data rich environment, in which larger and larger volumes of data are constantly being generated by its processes. However, only a relatively small portion of it is actually taken advantage of by manufacturers. As such, the proposed Intelligent Data Analysis and Real-Time Supervision (IDARTS) framework presents the guidelines for the implementation of scalable, flexible and pluggable data analysis and real-time supervision systems for manufacturing environments. IDARTS is aligned with the current Industry 4.0 trend, being aimed at allowing manufacturers to translate their data into a business advantage through the integration of a Cyber-Physical System at the edge with cloud computing. It combines distributed data acquisition, machine learning and run-time reasoning to assist in fields such as predictive maintenance and quality control, reducing the impact of disruptive events in production.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    The future of factories: Different trends

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    The technological advancements promote the rise of the fourth industrial revolution, where key terms are efficiency, innovation, and enterprises’ digitalization. Market globalization, product mass customization, and more complex products need to reflect on changing the actual design methods and developing business processes and methodologies that have to be data-driven, AI-assisted, smart, and service-oriented. Therefore, there is a great interest in experimenting with emerging technologies and evaluating how they impact the actual business processes. This paper reports a comparison among the major trends in the digitalization of a Factory of the Future, in conjunction with the two major strategic programs of Industry 4.0 and China 2025. We have focused on these two programs because we have had experience with them in the context of the FIRST H2020 project. European industrialists identify the radical change in the traditional manufacturing production process as the rise of Industry 4.0. Conversely, China mainland launched its strategic plan in China 2025 to promote smart manufacturing to digitalize traditional manufacturing processes. The main contribution of this review paper is to report about a study, conducted and part of the aforementioned FIRST project, which aimed to investigate major trends in applying for both programs in terms of technologies and their applications for the factory’s digitalization. In particular, our analysis consists of the comparison between Digital Factory, Virtual Factory, Smart Manufacturing, and Cloud Manufacturing. We analyzed their essential characteristics, the operational boundaries, the employed technologies, and the interoperability offered at each factory level for each paradigm. Based on this analysis, we report the building blocks in terms of essential technologies required to develop the next generation of a factory of the future, as well as some of the interoperability challenges at a different scale, for enabling inter-factories communications between heterogeneous entities

    INDUSTRIAL DEVICE INTEGRATION AND VIRTUALIZATION FOR SMART FACTORIES

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    Given the constant industry growth and modernization, several technologies have been introduced in the shop floor, in particular regarding industrial devices. Each device brand and model usually requires different interfaces and communication protocols, a technological diversity which renders the automatic interconnection with production management software extremely challenging. However, combining key technologies such as machine monitoring, digital twin and virtual commissioning, along with a complete communication protocol like OPC UA, it is possible to contribute towards industrial device integration on a Smart Factory environment. To achieve this goal, several methodologies and a set of tools were defined. This set of tools, as well as facilitating the integration tasks, should also be part of a virtual engineering environment, sharing the same virtual model, the digital twin, through the complete lifecycle of the industrial device, namely the project, simulation, implementation and execution/monitoring/supervision and, eventually, decommissioning phases. A key result of this work is the development of a set of virtual engineering tools and methodologies based on OPC UA communication, with the digital twin implemented using RobotStudio, in order to accomplish the complete lifecycle support of an industrial device, from the project and simulation phases, to monitoring and supervision, suitable for integration in Industry 4.0 factories. To evaluate the operation of the developed set of tools, experiments were performed for a test scenario with different devices. Other relevant result is related with the integration of a specific industrial device – CNC machining equipment. Given the variety of monitoring systems and communication protocols, an approach where various solutions available on the market are combined on a single system is followed. These kinds of all-in-one solutions would give production managers access to the information necessary for a continuous monitoring and improvement of the entire production process

    Business and technological perspectives of Industry 4.0 A framework for thinking with case illustration = Az Ipar 4.0 üzleti és technológiai vetületei Gondolkodási keret esettanulmánnyal illusztrálva

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    In the last couple of years, we have witnessed an exponentially increasing interest of academia and professionals towards Industry 4.0 (I4.0). By focusing on the firm level of I4.0, the authors propose a framework highlighting several technical (technologies and applications, design principles) and business (vision, impact on competitiveness, integration, types of innovation, maturity) perspectives of the phenomenon. Their goal is to clarify the most frequent perspectives and by using them build a thinking framework, making readers understand what I4.0 is about. While frameworks are usually elaborated on a conceptual basis, this paper illustrates the selected perspectives and their links by an in-depth case study. A factory’s digital transformation interpreted in the framework emphasizes the importance of research design and context. ------ Az elmúlt néhány évben a tudományos élet és a vállalati szakemberek exponenciálisan növekvő érdeklődését tapasztaljuk az Ipar 4.0 (I4.0) iránt. Az I4.0 vállalati szintjére összpontosítva olyan keretrendszert javasolnak a szerzők, amely kiemeli a jelenség számos technikai (technológiák és alkalmazások, tervezési alapelvek) és üzleti (vízió, versenyképesség, integráció, innováció típusai, érettség) vetületét. Céljuk, hogy a szakmai diskurzusban leggyakrabban előkerülő vetületek tartalmának tisztázása után azokból egy gondolkodási keretet építsenek. Míg a keretrendszerek általában elvi megfontolások alapján születnek, a cikk egy feldolgozóipari cég I4.0 transzformációját bemutató esettanulmány segítségével szemlélteti az egyes vetületeket és azok összekapcsolódását. A vizsgált gyár gondolkodási keretben értelmezett digitális átalakulása rámutat a kutatások tervezésének és kontextusának fontosságára

    Different Perspectives of a Factory of the Future: An Overview

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    Digitalfactory,andCloudManufacturingaretwoapproaches that aim at addressing the Factory of the Future, i.e., to provide digital support to manufacturing factories. They find their roots in two different geographical areas, respectively Europe and China, and therefore presents some differences as well as the same goal of building the factory of the future. In this paper, we present both the digital factory and the cloud manufacturing approaches and discuss their differences

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

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    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
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