The production of multi-variant and customized products has become increasingly important in recent years. Traditional production plants are often not flexible enough to adapt quickly to changing requirements. The engineering of adaptable production plants can become highly complex and therefore personnel and time intensive. This paper presents an approach that enables the flexible aggregation of autonomous modules into a production network using new Plug & Produce technologies. In order to minimize the programming effort, the control program for the modules is composed of generally applicable, ready-made program blocks and automatically configured for the respective requirements. The modules offer their skills to the production network via defined interfaces. These skills are not rigidly programmed for a fixed application, but are parameterized more precisely by reading out the workpiece to be processed. An intelligent material flow strategy of the modules transports the workpieces efficiently to the relevant production modules. The concept is enabled by a unified semantic structure, as well as decentralized and structured data management in the Industry 4.0 Asset Administration Shells (AAS) of the modules and workpiece carriers. A well-designed communication architecture and the AAS Agent Server developed as part of the project ensure the smooth information exchange between the software and AAS, as well as between the modules. The mechanisms are verified both in a simulation environment and on a real model factory in order to test their functionality and efficiency.
Schmidl et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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