Constantin Wagner

The role of the Industry 4.0 asset administration shell and the digital twin during the life cycle of a plant

Industry 4.0 has come up with an impressive number of additional terms and definitions e.g. Asset Administration Shell or Digital Twin. Those terms stand for Industry 4.0 coreparadigms, but their meaning is not harmonized even among experts. This is a source of misunderstanding and confusion. In this paper, the mentioned terms are discussed along the life cycle of a plant. A plants life cycle comprises the whole process from its idea to its destruction. During the discussion of the terms not only the concepts, but also the visions of Industry 4.0 are clarified. Goal of this paper is not to define additional terms, but to explain and substantiate existing ones and to solve apparent contradictions. Additional outcome of the discussion are architectural recommendations for an upcoming Industry 4.0 architecture. Moreover, suggestions for device manufacturers, system integrators, plant owners and Industry 4.0 architects are given.

A modular benchmark for evaluating load distribution algorithms

In the last few years, resources sharing has been one of the main focal points of the German initiative “Industrie 4.0”. Resources sharing can be properly guided by load distribution algorithms. With the availability of many load distribution algorithms, it can be an intricate decision to match the use case with the correspondent most fitting algorithm. For an easier matching process, a benchmark is introduced along with the most important quantitative and qualitative key performance indicators that cover the pivot factors that affect the performance factors in the field of engineering automation.

Model based synthesis of automation functionality

Abstract The article demonstrates the advantages of meta-model-based solutions for multi-aspect automation tasks. Multi-aspect tasks require solutions that consider information of multiple system aspects simultaneously. In todays practice, these aspects are maintained in different tools which make implicitly use of tool-driven system models. In contrast, we propose to prioritize the models in order to facilitate the handling of multi-aspect automation tasks. The article exemplifies this idea by introducing typical automation and engineering models and illustrates their utility in a use-case example.

Fundamentals for the next generation of automation solutions of the fourth industrial revolution

Due to rising engineering expenses, increasing cost pressure and additional flexibility requirements new methods of software development have to be adapted in the automation domain. The key challenge is the development of reusable, maintainable and adaptable automation solutions. These software qualities are directly influenced by the software architecture. Therefore the authors present a software architecture for the next generation automation solution and a process that ensures the proper implementation of the architecture. Afterward, an example for such an automation solutions is given.

Variant management for control blocks

The fact that normal tasks of control blocks are highly complex and unnecessarily overfitted has led to superfluously high workloads with regard to engineering and development. Existing concepts of variability handling are not designed for this use case. Therefore we present a new variant description model and concept for a control block variant management technique. This concept ensures that the control blocks only have the functionality and complexity that is needed for the actual task. The development and implementation effort is reduced because of the increased re-usability of each control blocks functionality.