Software-Defined Manufacturing for the Entire Life Cycle at Different Levels of Production

Abstract

Increasingly volatile markets, higher numbers of product variants and more sophisticated customer demands lead to a soaring complexity of productions themselves and their operations. An enabling technology that allows to cope with this increased complexity is digitization, as it enables data capturing and data driven analysis in production. Software-defined manufacturing (SDM) empowers to fully use the potential of digitization by decoupling physical production hardware and the associated control software. This enables an increase in the versatility of existing resources through automated generation of software for instantiations and interventions in production control. With the aim of enlarging the abstraction and decoupling capabilities of SDM, this paper presents a concept to use SDM at different abstraction levels of the production over the whole life cycle. The different abstraction levels, i.e. machine, production system and production network, are decoupled based on a service-oriented approach that defines interactions between these abstraction levels. The requirements to implement this approach are determined for the different levels where special notice is given to changing requirements over the life cycle of the production. With respect to the requirements, recommendations are given considering the integration of the concept in existing productions. Finally, potential benefits of this concept are discussed.