Kristofer Bengtsson

Sequence Planning for Integrated Product, Process and Automation Design

In order to obtain a unified information flow from early product design to final production, an integrated framework for product, process and automation design is presented. The framework is based on sequences of operations and includes a formal relation between product properties and process operations. This relation includes liaisons (interfaces) and precedence relations, where the precedence relations generate preconditions for the related process operations. From this information a set of sequences of operations (SOPs) is generated. A formal graphical language for hierarchical operations and SOPs is then introduced and defined based on automata extended with variables. Since the operations are self-contained they can be grouped and viewed from different angles, e.g., from a product or a resource perspective. These multiple views increase the interoperability between different engineering disciplines. A case study is performed on a car manufacturing cell, where the suggested modeling framework is shown to give comprehensible SOPs.

An event-driven manufacturing information system architecture for Industry 4.0

Future manufacturing systems need to be more flexible, to embrace tougher and constantly changing market demands. They need to make better use of plant data, ideally utilising all data from the entire plant. Low-level data should be refined to real-time information for decision-making, to facilitate competitiveness through informed and timely decisions. The Line Information System Architecture (LISA), is presented in this paper. It is an event-driven architecture featuring loose coupling, a prototype-oriented information model and formalised transformation services. LISA is designed to enable flexible factory integration and data utilisation. The focus of LISA is on integration of devices and services on all levels, simplifying hardware changes and integration of new smart services as well as supporting continuous improvements on information visualisation and control. The architecture has been evaluated on both real industrial data and industrial demonstrators and it is also being installed at a large automotive company. This article is an extended and revised version of the paper presented at the 2015 IFAC Symposium on Information Control in Manufacturing (INCOM 2015). The paper has been restructured in regards to the order and title of the chapters, and additional information about the integration between devices and services aspects have been added. The introduction and the general structure of the paper now better highlight the contributions of the paper and the uniqueness of the framework.

Sequence Planning Using Multiple and Coordinated Sequences of Operations

The sequential behavior of a manufacturing system results from several constraints introduced during the product, manufacturing, and control logic development. This paper proposes methods and algorithms for automatically representing and visualizing this behavior from various perspectives throughout the development process. A new sequence planning approach is introduced that uses self-contained operations to model the activities and execution constraints. These operations can be represented and visualized from multiple perspectives using a graphical and formal language called Sequences of Operations (SOPs). The operations in a manufacturing system are related to each other in various ways, due to execution constraints expressed by operation pre- and post-conditions. These operation relations include parallel, sequence, arbitrary order, alternative, and hierarchy relations. Based on the SOP language, these relations are identified and visualized in various SOPs and sequences. A software tool, Sequence Planner, has been developed, for organizing the operations into SOPs that visualize only relevant operations and relations.

Energy optimization of multi-robot systems

This paper presents an optimization algorithm that has been able to save up to 45% of the energy consumption of an industrial multi-robot system. The tool Sequence Planner now includes these algorithms, focusing on minimizing energy consumption. The goal has been to reduce the energy consumption of individual robots and robots interacting in a work station, without changing the original paths or the total cycle time. The presented algorithms are based on an efficient and rapid nonlinear model for optimizing the sequences of operations and the motion trajectories. Smart simplification of the optimization problem together with innovative tools for logging data and executing the optimized trajectories on real robots has resulted in 18% to 45% saving of the energy consumption in the presented test scenarios.

AREUS — Innovative hardware and software for sustainable industrial robotics

Industrial Robotics (IR) may be envisaged as the key technology to keep the manufacturing industry at the leading edge. Unfortunately, at the current state-of-the-art, IR is intrinsically energy intensive, thus compromising factories sustainability in terms of ecological footprint and economic costs. Within this scenario, this paper presents a new framework called AREUS, focusing on eco-design, eco-programming and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of robotized factories. The objective is to overcome current IR energetic limitations by providing a set of integrated technologies and engineering platforms. In particular, novel energy-saving hardware is firstly introduced, which aim at exchanging/storing/recovering energy at factory level. In parallel, innovative engineering methods and software tools for energy-focused simulation are developed, as well as energy-optimal scheduling of multi-robot stations. At last, LCA methods are briefly described, which are capable to assess both environmental and economic costs, linked to the flows of Material, Energy and Waste (MEW). A selected list of industrially-driven demonstration case studies is finally presented, along with future directions of improvement.

The Origin of Operations: Interactions Between the Product and the Manufacturing Automation Control System

This paper investigates the interaction and relationship between the product design and the control logic design for manufacturing automation system. One important challenge during the development of a manufacturing automation system, is to handle the information related to the manufacturing control system (i.e PLC), since it influences almost every part of the manufacturing design and process. Therefore it is crucial to know when and how this information is created, to be able to increase the development quality and efficiency. This is especially true for the product related information that impacts the design of the control system. This paper studies the liaisons, the interfaces among parts and features in the product design, and its relationship with operations and resources in the manufacturing system. These liaisons must be considered in both product and manufacturing development since the inter-relation between liaisons and operations establishes the direct mapping of constraints and demands between the two domains. This paper further proposes how the manufacturing operations can be described during the development and how they are realized by resources in the manufacturing system. An example from automotive industry is included in this paper, to demonstrate the proposed concept.

Planning transport sequences for flexible manufacturing systems

When designing a manufacturing system it is important to plan what the system should do. One important activity in most manufacturing systems is to transport products or resources between different positions. In a flexible manufacturing system it can be challenging to design and plan these transport operations due to their complex logical behavior. This paper presents a method that identifies, creates and visualizes these transport operations based on inputs from a standard virtual manufacturing tool and a high level product operation recipe. The planning of the created transport operations is transformed into a problem of finding a non-blocking solution for a discrete model of the product refinement.

Energy and Peak Power Optimization of Time-Bounded Robot Trajectories

This paper, as an outcome of the EU project AREUS, heralds an optimization procedure that reduces up to 30% of energy consumption and up to 60% in peak-power for the trajectories that were tested on a real industrial robot. We have evaluated a number of cost functions and tested our algorithm for a variety of scenarios such as varying cycle times, payloads, and single/two-robot cases. The significance of our work is not only in the impressive savings, simplicity of implementation and preserving path and cycle time, but also in the effort made to carry out the optimization and experiments in as realistic conditions as possible, and the guidelines we provide to achieve this.

Flexible Specification of Operation Behavior Using Multiple Projections

The execution behavior of a system or a product can often be specified by a set of operations (sometimes called tasks, actions or activities). The process to specify these operations seems to be a real challenge in various situations, for example when designing automation systems or keeping track of the work at an emergency department. To be flexible during design and development, is about coping with uncertainty. However, in practice, specifying operation behavior is often quite inflexible because every possible execution route is explicitly defined. This approach is sometimes refereed to as point-based engineering, which is characterized by the early selection and approval of a single “best” specific solution. This approach can result in neither a robust nor a flexible design process with many rework iterations. This paper instead suggests a set-based operation specification approach that does not explicitly defines operation routes, where instead the operation behavior is specified using the execution restrictions in transition conditions for each operation. This enables the possibility to create multiple projections of the operation relations to enable better understanding. This is accomplished by creating various Sequences of Operations, sequences of operations (SOP), including a multiplicity of sequences and operation relations. Two example case studies are presented, where the first show the development of an automation system and the second study uses sequence projections in an emergency department at a hospital to handle the complex and flexible operation (task) behavior.

Reduced-order synthesis of operation sequences

In flexible manufacturing systems a large number of operations need to be coordinated and supervised to avoid blocking and deadlock situations. The synthesis of such supervisors soon becomes unmanageable for industrial manufacturing systems, due to state space explosion. In this paper we therefore develop some reduction principles for a recently presented model based on self-contained operations and sequences of operations. First sequential operation behaviors are identified and related operation models are simplified into one model. Then local transitions without interaction with other operation models are removed. This reduction principle is applied to a synthesis of non-blocking operation sequences, where collisions among moving devices are guaranteed to be avoided by a flexible booking process. The number of states in the synthesis procedure and the computation time is reduced dramatically by the suggested reduction principle.