Industry 4.0 interface for dynamic reconfiguration of an open lab size automated production system to allow remote community experiments

Nowadays, there are various use cases and proprietary demonstrators for Industry 4.0 or Cyber Physical Production Systems (CPPS) developed, operated and maintained by one or multiple research institutions. Within the development of new technologies for Industry 4.0, such demonstrators are used to support the interaction with the physical world, i.e. the machinery containing sensors and actuators. In this paper, we propose a concept that allows remote access using an Industry 4.0 interface on an open lab size automated production system (aPS), which has been available and used as a research community demonstrator for more than 5 years. Besides availability of evolution scenarios in various models and code, offering the possibility to conduct experiments from remote enables easier access and opportunities to interact with an aPS and provides a basis for concepts like production as a service and other research areas. The proposed concept is based on a model-driven approach that allows a dynamic reconfiguration of automation control code and generates a middleware interface. The middleware dynamically offers the possibility to retrieve information about the aPS and to control it via web services.