Towards adaptable manufacturing systems

Life cycles of many products are becoming shorter. In addition, the number of variants of one product is growing. As a fact, volume of one specific product that is being manufactured is decreasing. This leads to more frequent modifications of production lines. To cope with these changes, adaptable manufacturing systems are required. Current manufacturing systems can only be adapted to certain (predefined) situations. Other changes require high effort accompanied with high cost and setup time. In this paper, we focus on adaptivity with respect to IT systems. To increase the adaptability of IT systems for automation, we propose a model-based plug&play approach for integrating new stations. This helps in reducing changeover time and efforts. We propose different models describing stations and their capabilities, the setup of the factory, and the production plans. The system is then monitored automatically and the production is planned using models@run-time. To abstract from different platforms and communication technologies data transfer is handled by a middleware. We evaluate our approach using an industrial production system used for educational purposes.