Volume 71, Issue 5 - Special Issue: Methods, approaches and applications in software-driven manufacturing; Guest Editors: Birgit Vogel-Heuser, Tobias Kleinert and Ina Schaefer

Driven by shorter innovation and product life cycles as well as economic volatility, the demand for reconfiguration of production systems is increasing. Thus, a systematic literature review on reconfiguration management in manufacturing is conducted within this work in order to determine by which degree this is addressed by the literature. To approach this, a definition of reconfiguration management is provided and key aspects of reconfigurable manufacturing systems as well as shortcomings of today’s manufacturing systems reconfiguration are depicted. These provide the basis to derive the requirements for answering the formulated research question. Consequently, the methodical procedure of the literature review is outlined, which is based on the assessment of the derived requirements. Finally, the obtained results are provided and noteworthy insights are given.

Software-Defined Manufacturing (SDM) is a new paradigm for how to manufacture in the Industry 4.0 factory of the future. The approach requires a fundamental change in thinking and reinvention of central business models in production technology. This paper discusses the main challenges on the way to a software-defined factory of the future and illustrates possible solutions. An exemplary future factory is presented, in which the validation of the solutions is carried out. For this purpose, cloud-based Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) is considered as use case. Experimental results demonstrate the proof of concept and show the potential for further applications.

During the development of intralogistics systems (ILS), heterogeneous models are created, which represent discipline-specific views, e.g., control software developed by automation engineers or discrete-event simulation models created by simulation engineers. These models represent discipline-specific views on the system but contain overlapping information. Thereby, keeping the information in different development models consistent is challenging and currently requires high manual effort, which highly depends on the developers’ experience. To overcome this challenge, an approach to link heterogeneous model data and identify potential information inconsistencies within and between models automatically is proposed. The concept is evaluated with a use case containing three typical inconsistencies from five representative engineering models applied in ILS development.

This article presents a model-based mutation framework for creating mutant systems implemented in IEC61131-3 languages. The framework is based on a meta-model of the IEC61131-3 standard. It supports 21 mutation operations, such as the addition or removal of POUs or the mutation of Structured Text and Sequential Functional Charts. Moreover, operations can be combined to create higher-order changes, such as Type III code clones. The mutation framework can be used to evaluate and improve development tools for supporting the evolution of manufacturing systems, such as regression test suite generators or clone detectors.

A concept has been developed which enables the virtualization and consolidation of NC controllers for machine tools. By decoupling control hardware and software, dynamic scaling of computing power depending on the complexity of the control functions becomes possible. The use of monolithic and over-dimensioned control systems, which are most often not fully exploited but no longer sufficient when new requirements arise, is avoided. Additionally, economic advantages might be exploited by consolidating multiple controllers in an edge cloud. Initial experiments have shown that purely software-based solutions on standard IT hardware are suitable for reliably achieving the required cycle times.

Industry 4.0 is a paradigm that plays a central role in the development of future automation systems. A new generation of industrial automation aims to increase the agility of automation systems. In this context, cooperation with the IT world is an important prerequisite to achieving the requested agility. Therefore, new architectures and solutions have to be developed to realize cooperation between automation and IT systems. The goal of this work is to present for the process industry an architectural design for industrial control systems in order to provide them with a higher level of connectivity and agility.