Alexander Dennert

Layered architecture for production and logistics cockpits

Modern production environments require integrated views on different processes (manufacturing, logistics) at different levels to enable analysis and optimization of these processes. The views can be provided by cockpits allowing the insights for different responsible persons. The purpose of the EU-funded project PLANTCockpit is to develop a general approach for creating of such cockpits for different industries and application scenarios. One aspect of this is the development of the corresponding cockpit architecture enabling generic access on different information systems, flexible analysis and visualization of the information as well as easy user-and application-specific configuration. This paper presents the main requirements on and principles of such architecture, including different layers of the architecture as well as flexible data and control workflow based on the unified messaging. At the end, the architecture is validated by applying on two application scenarios of energy monitoring and asset optimization.

Advanced Concepts for Flexible Data Integration in Heterogeneous Production Environments

Data integration is a key function in modern production environments. A multitude of data sources need to be accessed in order to extract, aggregate, evaluate, and present the right data to the right user at the right time. Service oriented solutions let expect benefits for this tasks, since they provide the loose coupling of applications and thus the requested flexibility for integration. The paper discusses advanced concepts by applying the SOA paradigm to a Function Block approach. The evaluation of the concepts has been performed within prototypes of the PLANTCockpit project.

Virtual industrial Ethernet devices for testing purposes

In this article an approach towards a modular generic field device, running on standard PC-hardware is presented. The work focusses on generating large numbers of software devices to be employed in stress test scenarios. The concept is based upon open source operating systems and virtualization. The design decisions regarding platform and device structure are discussed in detail. Furthermore a forecast on future real time capabilities of the approach is presented.

Rule-driven manufacturing control based on ontologies

Manufacturing control is an increasingly challenging task in many domains due to the complexity of production processes. In many Manufacturing Execution Systems, rule-based components therefore steadily become harder to analyze and to maintain as the number of rules usually grows with the age of the factory. As a result, given large rule sets accumulating over the years of operation, the behavior of such systems is hard to predict and changes to rule sets or referenced master data may lead to undesired and often very costly behavior. This paper describes an approach to rule-driven decisions based on knowledge about the factory stored in ontologies. Expressing rules and master data in OWL and reasoning on these knowledge bases allows better understanding of the control systems and more intuitive rules. Most importantly, several features of the rule sets and the corresponding master data can be verified whenever changes are necessary thus leading to a more predictable control system even with large rule sets.

Lifecycle management related model approach for wireless automation

Although there are already many applications using wireless communication in industrial automation those wireless solutions (WS) are not yet fully integrated into the life cycle (LC) process of automation systems. Since several wireless technologies are candidates to fulfill given automation communication requirements it is almost impossible for automation engineers to select the appropriate solution, to plan wireless solutions, or to perform diagnosis or fault analysis of a wireless network. Wireless specialists are necessary for each potential WS. To overcome this problem a project was started to develop information models for each phase of the life cycle (LC) in order to support automation engineers recording or accessing the appropriate information when required. This paper introduces the objective and the approach of this project.

Using process models to support customer specific production processes

Todays production processes are becoming more and more flexible. Customers frequently demand specific production steps that fit to their processes. This leads to a needed flexibility for systems that are used to support decision making processes and the production itself. In this paper an approach is presented that uses process definition coming from an integrated enterprise modelling for connecting information systems and production systems modules. An architecture is presented that uses these models for each process step to provide the needed information for decision makers.

Diagnosis, alarms and their management in integrated automation systems

This paper presents an approach for managing alarms and diagnoses in an integrated IT and automation environment. In order to face the challenges of the integration of IT services with automation systems, an approach based on WBEM/CIM is presented. The provided solution is mostly not bound to specific vendors or fieldbus technologies and can easily be extended towards other requirements and scenarios.

The generic device on ARM based hardware — An analysis on cycle time limits

Flexibility is a key requirement in automation. This requires flexible solutions for design and implementation of field devices. The easy implementation of device functions for an early test in a system can be performed by introducing generalized approaches. The Generic Device, based on standard IT hard- and software, is an approach addressing this flexibility. The availability of low-price controller boards with Ethernet connection and general purpose I/O connectors, e.g. ARM based systems like Raspberry Pi, supports this idea. The paper analyses and discusses several alternatives for implementation of a Generic Device based on different hardware solutions. An analysis of cycle times and a comparison with dedicated industrial IO devices has been performed and the results are discussed. Topics for further work are discussed.