Digital twin-based optimiser for self-organised collaborative cyber-physical production systems

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s)The advantages of using collaborative and distributed systems to control and optimise industrial environments have been explored in recent years. However, the self-organised and dynamic approaches that deliver these same advantages bring challenges associated with the long-term unpredictability of these approaches. The proposed work aims to present a framework that integrates a Digital Twin-based Optimiser within these systems to predict the system's evolution and reconfigure it if required. Digital Twins can be an essential advantage in adopting these systems due to the possibility of carrying out simulations at an accelerated speed and reconfiguring the self-organised control system.publishersversionpublishe

An agent based architecture for material handling systems

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn the recent past, market requirements and consequently the production lines changed too. With the customization of products and the growing number of products to produce, the dy-namism and flexibility of the lines are now requirements of extreme importance. A traditional approach indicates great difficulty in satisfying those needs and as such has appeared some proposals in order to solve them. The proposed approaches are mostly related to scheduling and production planning. The transportation system is not usually inserted in the control architecture and system reconfiguration, constantly being put aside in order to this issue. This work proposes architecture to support self-organized transportation system, where it performs control functions and management. The architecture was developed for a system com-prising conveyors where the stations operate. The proposed work is a multi-agent architecture that use Dijkstra’s algorithm to improve the routing of products and materials. The main features of architecture are load balancing pre-sent in conveyors and ability to plug and unplug stations in runtime. The architecture was first tested in a virtual environment in order to check the behavior of the same and was subsequently tested in a real industrial cell in order to demonstrate its use in a real system

Increase the adoption of Agent-based Cyber-Physical Production Systems through the Design of Minimally Invasive Solutions

During the last few years, many approaches were proposed to offer companies the ability to have dynamic and flexible production systems. One of the conventional ap-proaches to solving this problem is the implementation of cyber-physical production sys-tems using multi-agent distributed systems. Although these systems can deal with several challenges faced by companies in this area, they have not been accepted and used in real cases. In this way, the primary objective of the proposed work is to understand the chal-lenges usually found in the adoption of these solutions and to develop a strategy to in-crease their acceptance and implementation. Thus, the document focuses on the design and development of cyber-physical produc-tion systems based on agent approaches, requiring minimal changes in the existing pro-duction systems. This approach aims of reducing the impact and the alterations needed to adopt those new cyber-physical production systems. Clarifying the subject, the author presents a definition of a minimal invasive agent-based cyber-physical production system and, the functional requirements that the designers and developers must respect to imple-ment the new software. From these functional requirements derived a list of design princi-ples that must be fulfilled to design and develop a system with these characteristics. Subsequently, to evaluate solutions that aim to be minimally invasive, an evaluation model based on a fuzzy inference system is proposed, which rank the approaches accord-ing to each of the design principles and globally. In this way, the proposed work presents the functional requirements, design principles and evaluation model of minimally invasive cyber-physical production systems, to increase the adoption of such systems

Collaborative approaches in sustainable and resilient manufacturing

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).In recent years, the manufacturing sector is going through a major transformation, as reflected in the concept of Industry 4.0 and digital transformation. The urge for such transformation is intensified when we consider the growing societal demands for sustainability. The notion of sustainable manufacturing has emerged as a result of this trend. Additionally, industries and the whole society face the challenges of an increasing number of disruptive events, either natural or human-caused, that can severely affect the normal operation of systems. Furthermore, the growing interconnectivity between organizations, people, and physical systems, supported by recent developments in information and communication technologies, highlights the important role that collaborative networks can play in the digital transformation processes. As such, this article analyses potential synergies between the areas of sustainable and resilient manufacturing and collaborative networks. The work also discusses how the responsibility for the various facets of sustainability can be distributed among the multiple entities involved in manufacturing. The study is based on a literature survey, complemented with the experience gained from various research projects and related initiatives in the area, and is organized according to various dimensions of Industry 4.0. A brief review of proposed approaches and indicators for measuring sustainability from the networked manufacturing perspective is also included. Finally, a set of key research challenges are identified to complement strategic research agendas in manufacturing.publishersversionpublishe

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

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

Application of a simulation-based digital twin for predicting distributed manufacturing control system performance

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.During the last years, several research activities and studies have presented the possibility to perform manufacturing control using distributed approaches. Although these new approaches aim to deliver more flexibility and adaptability to the shop floor, they are not being readily adopted and utilised by the manufacturers. One of the main challenges is the unpredictability of the proposed solutions and the uncertainty associated with these approaches. Hence, the proposed research aims to explore the utilisation of Digital Twins (DTs) to predict and understand the execution of these systems in runtime. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is leading to the emergence of new concepts amongst which DT stand out. Given their early stage, however, the already existing implementations are far from standardised, meaning that each practical case has to be analysed on its own and solutions are often created from scratch. Taking the aforementioned into account, the authors suggest an architecture that enables the integration between a previously designed and developed agent-based distributed control system and its DT, whose implementation is also provided in detail. Furthermore, the digital model’s calibration is described jointly with the careful validation process carried out. Thanks to the latter, several conclusions and guidelines for future implementations were possible to derive as well.publishersversionpublishe

How to Design Scheduling Solutions for Smart Manufacturing Environments Using RAMI 4.0?

Publisher Copyright: © 2013 IEEE. This work was supported in part by the European Union (EU) Project Advanced Manufacturing Solutions Tightly Aligned With Business Needs (AVANGARD), and in part by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under Grant 869986.The scheduling applied to manufacturing represents a huge opportunity for companies to stand out in a world of fast and big changes. Having a reliable scheduling system will allow factories to deal with the significant demand for highly customized products. Although manufacturing scheduling has been deeply studied for decades, there is still a gap between academia and industry, namely because the lack of flexibility and homogeneity among scheduling solutions, which makes them very use case-oriented. Furthermore, the absence of standardization is also making it difficult to implement smart scheduling solutions in industrial scenarios. Thus, this work presents a set of requirements and design principles based on axiomatic design concept, to make the first steps to standardize the designing and development of manufacturing scheduling solutions in the context of Industry 4.0. At the end, is presented a scheduling generic framework targeting smart manufacturing and evaluated in a practical use case.publishersversionpublishe

Selection of a data exchange format for industry 4.0 manufacturing systems

With the emergence of the Industry 4.0 concept, or the fourth industrial revolution, the industry is bearing witness to the appearance of more and more complex systems, often requiring the integration of various new heterogeneous, modular and intelligent elements with pre-existing legacy devices. This challenge of interoperability is one of the main concerns taken into account when designing such systems-of-systems, commonly requiring the use of standard interfaces to ensure this seamless integration. To aid in tackling this challenge, a common format for data exchange should be adopted. Thus, a study to select the foundations for the development of such a format is hereby presented, taking into account the specific needs of four different use cases representing varied key European industry sectors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Integration and deployment of a distributed and pluggable industrial architecture for the PERFoRM project

To meet flexibility and reconfigurability requirements, modern production systems need hardware and software solutions which ease the connection and mediation of different and heterogonous industrial cyber-physical components. Following the vision of Industry 4.0, the H2020 PERFoRM project targets, particularly, the seamless reconfiguration of robots and machinery. This paper describes the implementation of a highly flexible, pluggable and distributed architecture solution, focusing on several building blocks, particularly a distributed middleware, a common data model and standard interfaces and technological adapters, which can be used for connecting legacy systems (such as databases) with simulation, visualization and reconfiguration tools.This project has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680435info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Transience analysis of bursty traffic with erbium doped fiber amplifiers

Copyright © [2009] IEEE. Reprinted from ICTON 2009. ISBN 978-1-4244-4826-5. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of optical amplifiers, namely Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA) on Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks, operating at 2.5 Gb/s (typical bit rate for current passive optical networks - PON). Bursts with 212 – 1 and 216 – 1 pseudo random binary sequence (PRBS) were studied, with different idle times. The use of traffic with variable idle time was assessed in order to evaluate the effect on the burst initial amplitude. We also analyzed the performance of the packet based system by measuring the Q factor at the receiver and concluded that the performance is not affected by the type of traffic (variable or fixed idle times)