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Industrial production is increasingly driven by megatrends like globalization, product individualization, shorter product life cycles and volatile markets. This means that production equipment and facilities have to be adapted to new products and product variants in less time. On a technical level, major challenges in factory automation are about shorter engineering phases, quicker ramp-up of production lines and connecting technical processes to business processes. Modern information and communication technologies can help to cope with these challenges. Cyber-Physical Systems -Embedded systems with decentralized control intelligence can establish communication through opennetworks based on internet protocols. This will lead to the replacement of classical hierarchical automation systems by self-organizing cyber physical production systems. In the near future, intelligent products themselves will become an active component within automated manufacturing systems. However, in order to let this vision come true, automation has to converge with IT. Component based automation will help to elevate the signal based point of view, which is a core concept of automation technology since decades to the level of semantic interoperability. Field bus technologies will converge with IP based network technologies opening the way for easy vertical integration. Context aware automation will automatically adapt production and logistics processes to new configuration requirements. Of course open communication and open interaction will leadto security issues that will have to be addressed on more than the technical level. While some of these technological changeovers already have begun, others are still on the level of academic research concepts. The before mentioned developments do have the potential to lead to disruptive changes in the way automation equipment is engineered and utilized. Cyber-physical production systems will drive industrial manufacturing to the digital-age and create technological as well as the organizational basis for the 4th industrial revolution.

Abstract:Globalization, rising product variety, the need for continuously improving productivity and quality demand higher agility of manufacturing systems. Well-known principles like encapsulating functionality into mechatronic systems to enable reuse and standardization are basic approaches to gain agility in manufacturing environments. However, there is a lack of a holistic communication architecture for manufacturing systems and an overall concept to organize the continuously changing production planning and control processes. The paradigm of service-oriented architectures emerged as a concept to increase the flexibility and reuse within IT environments by using software modules with standardized communication interfaces. Transferring this paradigm to the field of manufacturing offers a unique opportunity to complement the advances of standardized communication interfaces and mechatronic encapsulation with powerful production planning and control methods.In this paper the central aspects and the potentials of transferring service-oriented paradigms from IT to automation are discussed. The methodology of process-oriented manufacturing planning is presented as the organizational fundament for an efficient establishment of service-oriented manufacturing systems. An approach for a process-oriented factory model is presented as the basis for a process-oriented planning process. Furthermore, a technical demonstrator that provides the opportunity for evaluating SOA technologies and our new planning approach is shown.

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Abstract:The increasing competition between manufacturers, the shortening of innovation cycles and the growing importance of resource-efficient manufacturing demand a higher versatility of factory automation. Service-oriented approaches depict a promising possibility to realize new control architectures by encapsulating the functionality of mechatronic devices into services. An efficient discovery, context-based selection and dynamic orchestration of these services are the key features for the creation of highly adaptable manufacturing processes. We describe a semantic service discovery and ad-hoc orchestration system, which is able to react to new process variants and changed contextual information (e.g., failure of field devices, requirements on the consumption of resources). Because a standardized vocabulary, especially for the description of mechatronic functionalities, is still missing in the manufacturing domain, the semantic description of services, processes and manufacturing plants as well as the semantic interpretation of contextual information play an important part.