José Barata

Service-Oriented Infrastructure to Support the Deployment of Evolvable Production Systems

Nowadays, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is becoming a broadly deployed standard for business and enterprise integration. It continuously spreads across the diverse layers of the enterprise organization and disparate domains of application envisioning a unified communication solution. In the industrial domain, Evolvable Production System (EPS) paradigm focus on the identification of guidelines and solutions to support the design, operation, maintenance, and evolution of complete industrial infrastructures. Similarly to several other domains, the crescent ubiquity of smart devices is raising important lifecycle concerns such as device setup, control, management, supervision and diagnosis. From initial setup and deployment to system lifecycle monitoring and evolution, each device needs to be taken into account and easily reachable. The present work exploits the association of EPS and SOA paradigms in the pursuit of a common architectural solution to support the different phases of the device lifecycle. The result is a modular, adaptive and open infrastructure forming a complete SOA ecosystem that will make use of the embedded capabilities supported by the proposed device model. The infrastructure components are specified and it is shown how they can interact and be combined to adapt to current system specificity and requirements. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype deployed in a real industrial production scenario is also detailed and results are presented.

SOA in reconfigurable supply chains: A research roadmap

Originally coming from the business world, service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is expanding its range of application into several different environments. Industrial automation is increasingly interested on adopting it as a unifying approach with several advantages over traditional automation. In particular, the paradigm is well indicated to support agile and reconfigurable supply chains due to its dynamic nature. In this domain, the main goals are short time-to-market, fast application (re)configurability, more intelligent devices with lifecycle support, technology openness, seamless IT integration, etc. The current research challenges associated to the application of SOA into reconfigurable supply chains are enumerated and detailed with the aim of providing a roadmap into a major adoption of SOA to support agile reconfigurable supply chains.

MAS and SOA: Complementary Automation Paradigms

This document surveys existing research in emergent concepts and technologies supporting the establishment of what are expected to be future automation systems. Multiagent systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are currently the most promising concepts in this matter. The authors experience in the implementation and study of SOA and MAS for distributed automation systems suggests that there are substantial benefits in converging both paradigms and technologies In this context, the goal of the present work is to unveil their strengths and weaknesses and propose the unification of complementary features as a mean to provide unprecedented support to the study, modelling, design and implementation of complex distributed systems.

Evolvable Assembly Systems Basic Principles

This paper addresses the underlying principles of Evolvable Assembly Systems. This paradigm was recently proposed as an answer to the requirements faced by assembly companies in the current world of business and technological changes. The basis for this new approach lies in a multi-disciplinary study of the needs and requirements, and shifts the technological focus from complex, flexible, multi-purpose systems to simpler, process-oriented, dedicated swarms of machine modules.

Designing Self-Organization for Evolvable Assembly Systems

Current solutions for industrial manufacturing assembly systems do not suit the needs of mass customization industry, which is facing low production volumes, many variants and rapidly changing conditions. This paper proposes the concept of self-organizing evolvable assembly systems, where assembly system modules and product parts to be assembled self-organize and self-adapt (among others, choose their coalition partners, their location and monitor themselves) in order to easily and quickly produce a new or reconfigured assembly system each time a new product order arrives or each time a failure or weakness arises in the current assembly system. This paper presents the design and partial implementation of such a system following an architecture for self-organizing and self-adaptive systems based on policies enforced at run-time on the basis of collected and updated metadata. As a case study, the assembly of a adhesive tape roller dispenser is considered.

Evolvable Production Systems Context and Implications

Agility, reactivity and sustainability are key to cope with todays dynamic markets, as has been broadly recognized. Depending on the source, manufacturing systems are required to be modular, hierarchical or heterarchical, distributed, flexible or reconfigurable; companies can be represented using the bionic, fractal and holonic concepts. Evolvable production systems fulfill the majority of the requirements elaborated by the agile and reconfigurable approaches and take nature as a metaphor. Modularity of fine granularity and local intelligence allow truly process-specific system design. EPS provide mechanisms for fast reconfiguration at mechanical as well as control level. They apply the multi-agent paradigm, which is intrinsically suited for distributed systems. Inspired by biology, artificial intelligence and complexity theory, EPS open the doors for the production systems of the future: the aim is to implement advanced concepts such as self- organization, self-diagnose and self-healing. Coping with emergent behavior will be fundamental, and taking profit of emergent capabilities will open considerable potential for new solutions.

Evolvable production systems : An integrated view on recent developments

Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) is a fundamentally new paradigm to design, maintain and evolve industrial systems. It is a holistic approach supporting product/shop floor co-evolution and ensuring a tailored and balanced solution for sustainable enterprise development. Its core is engineered by distributed intelligence materialized in proactive and interacting shop floor assets. These intelligent building blocks include a wise interface design that ensures plug-ability and promotes system integration and bio-inspired interaction mechanisms (control and monitoring/diagnosis) to emerge a consistent self-organizing response to production disturbances. In this article a short survey on recent technical and theoretical developments supporting the EPS paradigm is held.

Generic management services for DPWS-enabled devices

The crescent ubiquity of smart devices across several domains of application can raise important management issues. The complete ecosystem must be capable to handle this new reality. From initial configuration and deployment to lifecycle monitoring and diagnosis, each device needs to be taken in account and easily reachable. The application of Service-oriented architectures based on web standards can significantly enhance the interoperability and openness of those devices. Standards as DPWS allied to WS-Management can provide basic building blocks to accomplish this objective. This document specifies a set of common and generic management services built over these standards. Although the focus of this article is mainly over industrial automation domain, the approach can be easily replicated to several other domains.

Diagnosis using Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emergent approach to industrial control that accompanies new industrial paradigms in the response to the continuously changing socio-economic challenges posed to modern and future enterprises. Maximizing the profit under adverse market conditions is also a matter of cost cut and the use of distributed and intelligent devices with efficient diagnosis mechanisms can help improving equipments uptime either by reacting before a breakdown or recovering gracefully from failures.

An architecture development approach for evolvable assembly systems

This concept of evolvable, process-oriented modular systems may be viewed as a new business model to sustain European competitiveness in micro and mini assembly. It is clear that this business model implies a high dynamic lifecycle for shop floors. The system will move from a static life cycle since the modules that create the different systems will live beyond the product lifecycle. This dynamicity imposes strong requirements on the way systems are designed, installed, operated, and reengineered. Re-configurability is not enough. These requirements will not only have an impact on the individual control architecture of the modules but also on, and this is very important, how the system is created, and several types of co-existing architectures