Open Access

Christian Eymüller

• Due to the 4th Industrial Revolution, the industry is currently undergoing a transition from mass production to individual production, where each product is unique. This change in production means that it is no longer possible to design and develop the entire production plant, then build the system and produce the products. It may happen that a product is not yet known at the time when the plant is planned or realized. Therefore, flexible production facilities are needed to realize this transformation of production. Plug & Produce is a technique used for the realization of flexible production plants. Similar to the Plug & Play approach known from USB devices, for example, where devices are simply plugged in and can then be used. Plug & Produce is attempting to implement this approach for industrial components. Plug & Produce is a technique for quickly integrating production resources into systems and thus being able to produce quickly with these new resources. Production can beDue to the 4th Industrial Revolution, the industry is currently undergoing a transition from mass production to individual production, where each product is unique. This change in production means that it is no longer possible to design and develop the entire production plant, then build the system and produce the products. It may happen that a product is not yet known at the time when the plant is planned or realized. Therefore, flexible production facilities are needed to realize this transformation of production. Plug & Produce is a technique used for the realization of flexible production plants. Similar to the Plug & Play approach known from USB devices, for example, where devices are simply plugged in and can then be used. Plug & Produce is attempting to implement this approach for industrial components. Plug & Produce is a technique for quickly integrating production resources into systems and thus being able to produce quickly with these new resources. Production can be flexibly designed through the rapid integration or exchange of new production resources. The central result of this thesis is the development of a Real-Time Capable Plug & Produce (RealCaPP) architecture. This architecture makes it possible to add and exchange new production resources to a production system. To react quickly to new processes by adapting the software, and to execute these processes in real time distributed across multiple compute nodes. In order to quickly integrate new resources into the production system, a resource self-introduction mechanism has been developed. For this purpose, standardized self-descriptions were defined in a machine-readable form, describing the properties and skills of a resource. These descriptions are aggregated and merged into a global knowledge base of the system. This data can be used, for example, to automatically find plant configurations for specific tasks. Another important point is the exchange of data between product resources. Since process information must be exchanged between real-time-critical processes, the communication must also be realtime-capable. Therefore, a dynamic real-time communication platform was developed that can cope with changing resources and exchange process data in real-time. A real-time service architecture was developed for flexible process adaptation. Modular software components, so-called Real-Time Service (RTS), enable the implementation of resource skills (Basic Skills) and can be combined to form more complex skills (Composed Skills). These RTSs can be easily added to a system at runtime and executed afterwards. They can also be executed in a distributed manner. All these points were evaluated on two robotic cells for different case studies. It was shown that the same services used to screw aluminium profiles could also be reused to operate a portafilter coffee machine with a robot.…