Andrei Lobov

An IEC 61499 application generator for scan-based industrial controllers

In order to cope with todays market uncertainties, manufacturing is required to rapidly adapt and react to changes and unpredictable scenarios. These are currently among the main research and development topics in order to reveal new approaches and methodologies to achieve these goals. The Industrial Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) created the IEC 61499 (function block) standard. This standard proposes an open architecture for distributed industrial-process measurement and control systems (IPMCS). The IEC 61499 defines the basic concepts and methodology for the design of modular reusable distributable systems, and paves the way for the new reconfigurable and flexible manufacturing. This paper presents the development of a software tool (IEC 61499 application generator) that enables the deployment of IEC 61499 applications to scan-based embedded controllers. However, the IEC 61499 standard foundations rely on an event-based model. The paper describes an approach to implement an event-based architecture on a scan-based industrial controller.

Semantics-Based Composition of Factory Automation Processes Encapsulated by Web Services

This paper presents an approach to using semantic web services in managing production processes. In particular, the devices in the production systems considered expose web service interfaces through which they can then be controlled, while semantic web service descriptions formulated in web ontology language for services (OWL-S) make it possible to determine the conditions and effects of invoking the web services. The approach involves three web services that cooperate to achieve production goals using the domain web services. In particular, one of the three services maintains a semantic model of the current state of the system, while another uses the model to compose the domain web services so that they jointly achieve the desired goals. The semantic model of the system is automatically updated based on event notifications sent by the domain services.

Formal validation of intelligent-automated production systems: towards industrial applications

This paper introduces a framework for formal modelling and validation of automation systems destined to be used directly by control engineers. The framework is based on a modelling formalism of Net Condition/Event Systems (NCES), which is graphical, modular and typed. This allows for the modelling of realistic hierarchically organised automation systems in a closed plant-controller loop. The framework consists of methodologies and tools, which enable formal analysis of automation systems. The framework is to be used for the improvement of safety characteristics, reliability and robustness of such systems by means of prediction of potential faults and deadlocks.

A Semantic Web Services-based approach for production systems control

Recent research projects have experimented with controlling production system equipment through web service interfaces. However, orchestrating these web services to accomplish a complicated production task can be difficult because the states of the production equipment and the set of available web services may change. This paper proposes an approach in which the production equipment and their states are modelled with an ontology, and the semantic model is dynamically analyzed to determine which action should next be taken in the production process. Similarly, the available web services are described with semantic models, and the descriptions are retrieved dynamically to find the web services capable of performing the required actions. While Web Ontology Language, OWL, is used in describing equipment statuses, the OWL-S ontology, which is based on OWL, is used for describing web services. Once the semantic service descriptions have been analyzed to find the appropriate web services, the services are invoked using their syntactic WSDL descriptions.

Integration of Multi-Agent Systems and Service-Oriented Architecture for industrial automation

The highly dynamic environments imposed by reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) present a challenge for achieving fully automated reconfiguration. Of special interest are the situations in which new modular equipment is added to the production lines or in which existing equipment fails, since this calls for human intervention and long production delays. By integrating the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) through Web services (WS) into the factory automation domain it is possible to abstract and encapsulate the functionality of the devices as services. These services can be used independently of the devicepsilas physical location and of their software/hardware platforms. Furthermore, by providing an intelligent control mechanism for these services it is possible to improve the systemspsila reconfigurability. This paper proposes the integration of WS and a multi-agent system (MAS) in order to build a control architecture suitable for automated reconfigurability. The architecture is presented together with an analysis of the requirements for its implementation.

Cyber–Physical Systems for Open-Knowledge-Driven Manufacturing Execution Systems

Manufacturing execution systems play an important role of bridging high-level enterprise functions and production or manufacturing operations. The embedded systems are usually in charge of controlling execution of the operations. Modern embedded systems have become capable of simultaneous and deterministic execution of control algorithms and IP-based communication, making it possible to create complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs), where the computational and communication resources of a device can be used directly for various control, supervisory, or monitoring functions. The complexity for defining open-knowledge-driven manufacturing execution system (OKD-MES) is in maintaining awareness of overall system state to avoid disruptive actions as various functions may be requested from a system. The problem is that obtaining such information on system state may necessitate collecting data from a number of devices, as there may not be a single data point for state information. This paper describes and illustrates an approach for designing OKD-MES on top of CPSs that controls robot workstations and conveyor-based transportation system of a pallet-based production system.

Knowledge-based web service integration for industrial automation

Web services are widely used for enterprise software development. Web service protocols simplify application integration thanks to interface description that can be processed at runtime and, in addition, due to mature and widely used standards for transportation and internetworking. Implementation of service-oriented architecture starts to get acceptance in the field of industrial automation ranging from international research project to the first implementations in industry including first commercial controller devices supporting web service communication protocols and executing deterministic control at the same time. The current research step is to allow knowledge-based integration of industrial automation systems and to exploit full potentials of run-time reconfiguration and adaptation of industrial systems. This paper demonstrates implementation of knowledge-based industrial system, the architecture and ontology model that can be generalized for implementation of other production systems.

Semantic Web Services framework for manufacturing industries

Application of Semantic Web Services (SWS) relies on ontologies which model existing explicit knowledge in problem domain. Adaptation of SWS to manufacturing industries rises a number of important questions among which is the separation of responsibilities between different vendors starting from system component manufacturers and ending with the system user. This paper gives a possible solution to settle these responsibilities and describes the architecture for the orchestration of semantic web services.

Service oriented architecture in developing of loosely-coupled manufacturing systems

The control of manufacturing systems is traditionally addresses the needs of products or product family that the system is going to manufacture. That is, the needs for the products are defined prior to the design of the production line. Although some degree of flexibility (in the terms of product family) can be implemented in the system, such systems may still have limitations in not allowing rapid reconfiguration as a new product with unforeseen needs arrives at runtime. Such a scenario usually requires (partial) reprogramming of the production line to accommodate new products. This paper presents a service-oriented orchestration framework for seamless integration of service-enabled devices to allow rapid reconfiguration and dynamic discovery of the devices abstracted as web services.

OPC-UA and DPWS interoperability for factory floor monitoring using complex event processing

Future manufacturing systems will require to process large amounts of complex data due to a rising demand on visibility and vertical integration of factory floor devices with higher level systems. Systems contained in higher layers of the business model are rapidly moving towards a Service Oriented Architecture, inducing a tendency to push Web Technologies down to the factory floor level. Evidence of this trend is the addition of Web Services at the device level with Device Profile for Web Services and the transition of OPC based on COM/DCOM communication to OPC-UA based on Web Services. DPWS and OPC-UA are becoming nowadays the preferred options to provide on a device level, service-oriented solutions capable to extended with an Event Driven Architecture into manufacturing systems. Furthermore, it has been shown that interoperability between these two can enhance the implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture for industrial purposes. This paper proposes an implementation solution for supervision and monitoring of manufacturing systems on the factory floor level. The proposal involves management of heterogeneous events incoming from OPC-UA and DPWS using a complex event processor. The approach presented is applicable in distributed systems that may require an advance interpretation of data incoming from these two communication protocols.