Autonomous Production Workstation Operation, Reconfiguration and Synchronization

Abstract

The decoupling of production line’s workstations and its equipment from the higher layers in an automation architecture has the potential to provide the following benefits: 1. Dynamic workstation reconfiguration; 2. Autonomous synchronization of workstation equipment; 3. Autonomous workstation operation. Each of these benefits will improve the automation flexibility at each workstation and for the whole production line. Introducing IoT equipment into workstations and making use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) fundamentals such as lookup, late binding and loose coupling are shown here to provide the above benefits. In addition, the cost of such an implementation and deployment seems to be significantly less than the comparable cost for legacy technology. An implementation, using the SOA approach on a workstation, at the Volvo Trucks production facility in Gothenburg was made possible thanks to the Arrowhead framework, which has been shown to provide all three listed improvements. The analysis of the above-mentioned demonstration clearly shows how the workstation reconfiguration is made simple using the arrowhead ServiceRegistry system. Autonomous synchronization is achieved through the look-up and late binding capabilities provided by the arrowhead Orchestration system in cooperation with the ServiceRegistry system. Finally, autonomous workstation operation is provided through the support of the arrowhead Workflow Manager and Workflow Executor systems. All these benefits were achieved at a significantly reduced cost compared to comparable legacy implementation.