A strategic approach to improve the development of use-oriented knowledge-based engineering configurators (KBEC)

Web-Based Platform for Planning and Configuration of Robot-Based Automation Solutions: A Retrospective View on the Research Project ROBOTOP

“…Mostly, configurators are used for the individualization of predefined products such as clothes or automobiles [2] rather than new and dynamic engineering tasks. Therefore, we introduced the idea of a real knowledge-based engineering configurator (KBEC) [24], with which new RAS can be created based on BP [21] as well as customized and validated through constraints [15]. KBEC based on constraints [5,7] provide advantages in transferability, scalability, and maintainability.…”

“…In general, a PC gives automatic access to different existing product variants [2]. Due to the large solution space of RAS planning, the functional scope of a KBEC is less predefined compared to a PC [15,24], which requires additional development methods. Existing approaches are either not based on the product to be produced and do not consider interdependencies between product and production system or are too generic or focused on deviating production areas in order to adequately represent the details of specific RAS [6,11].…”

“…Fig. 1 Phases of the system integration process and relevant output documents [24] Web-Based Platform for Planning and ……”

“…To reduce the number of combination options and to secure the functionality of the configured target RAS, a BP based approach is ideal for KBEC. Due to the existing uncertainty and in order to specify the architecture based on concrete empirical values, various sub-prototypes were created [15,[18][19][20]24]. Through the prototypes a large interdependency becomes obvious, e.g.…”

“…Through the prototypes a large interdependency becomes obvious, e.g. the BP preparation is necessary for the click-prototype and the click-prototype to validate BP in the overall context [24,26]. ROBOTOP is based on the scalable and flexible idea of a microservice architecture, firstly introduced in 2006 through amazon [29].…”