Advanced Automation Solutions for Future Adaptive Factories (original) (raw)

Distributed Intelligent Automation Solutions for Self-adaptive Manufacturing Plants

Nowadays, a new generation of responsive factories is needed to face continuous changes in product demand and variety, and to manage complex and variant production processes. To such an aim, self-adaptive automation solutions are required, capable to adapt their control strategy in real-time to cope with planned as well as unforeseen product and process variations. In such a context, the present paper describes an automation solution based on a modular distributed approach for agile factory integration and reconfiguration, integrating a knowledge based cooperation policy providing self-adaptation to endogenous as well as exogenous events. The proposed approach is discussed through its application to a plant for customized shoe manufacturing.

The challenges along the road to the realisation of a factory automation lifecycle

Proceedings - International Computer Software and Applications Conference, 2008

Lifecycle support of a process from conception, implementation and evaluation can be enabled in a distributed cross organisational environment using Service Orientated Architectures (SOA). In the automation domain the development of such lifecycles are both vital for the competitiveness of European manufacturing and challenging due to the environments they exist in. This paper explores the main innovations needed to achieve SOA based application lifecycle management in the automation sector initially looking at a successful lifecycle implementation in the eScience community. This highlights the need for clearly defined standards architecture and ontology building methodologies for emerging SOA communities to achieve lifecycle management around clearly defined and managed metadata.

Enabling flexible manufacturing systems by using level of automation as design parameter

2009

Handling flexibility in an ever changing manufacturing environment is one of the key challenges for a successful industry. By using tools for virtual manufacturing, industries can analyze and predict outcomes of changes before taking action to change the real manufacturing systems. This paper describes a simulation tool that can be used to study the effect of level of automation issues on the design of manufacturing systems, including their effect on the overall system performance, ergonomics, environment, and economic measures. Determining a suitable level of automation can provide a manufacturing system with the flexibility needed to respond to the unpredictable events that occur in factory systems such as machine failures, lack of quality, lack of materials, lack of resources, etc. In addition, this tool is designed to use emerging simulation standards, allowing it to provide a neutral interface for both upstream and downstream data sources.

Towards Practical Guidelines for Conversion from a Fixed to a Reconfigurable Manufacturing Automation System

Procedia Manufacturing

It is generally considered to be a key requirement in the development of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, that economic feasibility is only attainable if the system is defined to be reconfigurable at the outset of its design. In this work we consider the potential exception to this requirement, in the context of a common industrial scenario where a specialized and expensive manufacturing machine or system will otherwise be rendered useless due to loss of business of the particular product being manufactured. Specific guidelines to convert from a fixed to a reconfigurable system are proposed, and evaluated through a case study.

A modular factory testbed for the rapid reconfiguration of manufacturing systems

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2019

The recent manufacturing trend toward mass customization and further personalization of products requires factories to be smarter than ever before in order to: (1) quickly respond to customer requirements, (2) resiliently retool machinery and adjust operational parameters for unforeseen system failures and product quality problems, and (3) retrofit old systems with upcoming new technologies. Furthermore, product lifecycles are becoming shorter due to unbounded and unpredictable customer requirements, thereby requiring reconfigurable and versatile manufacturing systems that underpin the basic building blocks of smart factories. This study introduces a modular factory testbed, emphasizing transformability and modularity under a distributed shop-floor control architecture. The main technologies and methods, being developed and verified through the testbed, are presented from the four aspects of rapid factory transformation: self-layout recognition, rapid workstation and robot reprogramming, inter-layer information sharing, and configurable software for shop-floor monitoring.

Towards Practical Guidelines for Conversion from Fixed to Reconfigurable Manufacturing Automation Systems

Journal of Industrial Integration and Management

It is generally considered that economic feasibility of a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is only attainable if the system is defined to be reconfigurable at the outset of its design. In this work, we consider the potential exception to this perception, in the context of a common industrial scenario where a specialized and expensive manufacturing machine or system will otherwise be rendered useless due to the loss of business of the particular product being manufactured. Specific guidelines to convert from a fixed to a reconfigurable system are proposed, and evaluated through a case study. It is shown that under certain conditions, RMSs may be economically feasible even if they are developed through the modification of pre-existing dedicated systems.

Development and Evaluation of a Model for Modular Automation in Plant Manufacturing

2004

The benefit of modular concepts in plant automation is seen ambivalent. On one hand it offers advantages, on the other hand it also sets requirements on the system structure as well as discipline of designer. The main reasons to use modularity in systems design for automation applications in industry are reusa6bility and reduction of complexity, but up to now modular concepts are rare in plant automation. This paper analyses the reasons and proposes measures and solution concepts. An analysis of the work flow and the working results of some companies in several branches show different proposals of modularity. These different proposals in production and process engineering are integrated in one model and represent different perspectives of an integrated system.

The Application of an Intersectoral Reconfigurable Manufacturing Automation Testbed to provide an Automation Solution to Industry

2014

In this work, we present the latest results in the development of a generic manufacturing automation testbed, that is being carried out in our laboratory. The testbed is highly reconfigurable in nature, and, unlike other reconfigurable automation systems found in the literature, is able to cater for the development of automation solutions for a wide variety of parts that do not belong to the same part family, or even to the same manufacturing sector. The testbed is intended to be used as a shared resource by a geographically-close cluster of diverse manufacturing companies. We present new detailed results on the design, selection, construction and/or procurement of specific off-the-shelf, reconfigurable and/or flexible components that form part of the system. We then focus on the application of our testbed to provide an automation solution in a real industrial test case, with an emphasis on how the generic resources of the testbed can be applied to the development of a very specific...

An intersectoral reconfigurable manufacturing automation testbed: Preliminary design considerations

2009 Asme Iftomm International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots, 2009

This paper presents the preliminary work towards the development of a generic manufacturing automation testbed intended for application to a range of different manufacturing sectors. This study is part of an academia-industry collaborative project aimed at increasing the competitiveness of a relatively large cluster of diverse manufacturing firms which are operating in a small and geographically isolated economy. Following an in-depth investigation of the target industry, various disadvantages to competitiveness are identified. To aid these manufacturing companies, this work aims to develop a generic intersectoral automation testbed, on which various unrelated manufacturing solutions will be developed, with a focus on implementing automated modular reconfigurable manufacturing systems. The testbed itself must be modular and reconfigurable since it must be capable of providing a large variety of different solutions to clients coming from various manufacturing sectors. The design and developmental considerations, approaches and guidelines for this intersectoral testbed, and the nature of subsequent manufacturing solutions, are discussed in this work. . Index Terms-Reconfigurable Manufacture

System-level performance of an automation solution based on industry standards

Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Emerging Technology and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2014

The flexibility and reconfigurability requirements of factories and manufacturing plants of the future can be partially met by adopting technologies and solutions already available for testing and experimentation. Openness and adherence to international standards are becoming increasingly important in modern distributed production and automation systems, especially when they have to cope with ever-increasing product differentiations and short product lifecycles. However, the increased flexibility and openness should not come to detriment of the system real-time characteristics. This paper deals with a pilot mechatronic architecture for agile transport systems, which has been specifically developed to enable the study of the aforementioned aspects in the framework of the "Factory of the Future" Italian flagship project. In particular, the paper focuses on possible bottlenecks and pitfalls at the operating system and communication levels, and provides preliminary indications on how to address or mitigate them by means of solutions already available on the market.