Integrated Framework for Safety Management and Software-Assisted Safety Assessment in Fluid Production

Abstract

In the factory of the future, the concept of fluid production allows production processes to be adapted more frequently and efficiently to fulfill rapidly-changing product requirements and to prevail in an increasingly challenging market environment. Production resources, machinery and humans are integrated seamlessly to achieve common production goals. Rapid changes in system configurations are also enabled by highly modular, self-descriptive and reusable machinery modules called Mechatronic Objects. The high reconfigurability in fluid production poses new challenges for the safety management of future production systems. Every modification done to an existing system needs to be risk assessed and approved during the commissioning to allow its safety-compliant operation. As current industrial practices for risk assessment are still labor-intensive and time-consuming, new methods are needed to quickly integrate the aforementioned highly modular Mechatronic Objects into fluid production systems. In this paper, we propose a safety management and assessment framework to address the safety-related challenges for fluid production. This paper proposes a new modeling method to describe the different types of Mechatronic Objects and derives different stages for the assessment and approval of fluid production systems. This allows a more efficient and accelerated commissioning phase, a seamlessly integrated production and the reduction of manual efforts needed for the system commissioning. The proposed framework, the methods and the implemented software tools are validated using a case study for a highly reconfigurable assembly system at the research campus ARENA2036 at the University of Stuttgart.