Increasing agility in engineering and runtime of automated manufacturing systems

Abstract

Modifications in product and system requirements as well as adaptations in lot sizes that cannot be foreseen in the initial planning period require rapid changes and, therefore, reconfigurable manufacturing systems. However, traditional automation technologies based on traditional procedural programming languages such as IEC 61131-3 often lack in flexibility. This paper presents two different approaches contributing to this field of research in order to enhance efficiency and flexibility in automation engineering, namely model-based engineering with automated code generation and dynamic orchestration of semantic web services. A combination of both approaches into an integrated concept are discussed, promising significantly increased flexibility and, by that, reconfigurability through ad-hoc code generation from models during deployment time.