Production plan-driven flexible assembly automation architecture

Abstract

Manufacturing industries are currently under a strong pressure to easily adapt to changing market situations. In order to stay profitable production automation systems need to flexibly adapt to different products, product variants, and product volumes. In this work we investigate how a flexible recipe-based control approach can be transferred from batch automation systems to discrete manufacturing. We define a generic control architecture and a manufacturing recipe model that allows to execute recipe parts directly in the low-level control devices of the involved manufacturing cells. An evaluation of the developed system on a demonstration plant shows the aptness for discrete manufacturing. The developed system with its flexibility on the lowest control level can also serve as a foundation for highly flexible supervising control strategies like the HMS approach. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.