Stefan Silcher

The Data-driven Factory - Leveraging Big Industrial Data for Agile, Learning and Human-centric Manufacturing

Global competition in the manufacturing industry is characterized by ever shorter product life cycles, increasing complexity and a turbulent environment. High product quality, continuously improved processes as well as changeable organizational structures constitute central success factors for manufacturing companies. With the rise of the internet of things and Industrie 4.0, the increasing use of cyber-physical systems as well as the digitalization of manufacturing operations lead to massive amounts of heterogeneous industrial data across the product life cycle. In order to leverage these big industrial data for competitive advantages, we present the concept of the data-driven factory. The data-driven factory enables agile, learning and human-centric manufacturing and makes use of a novel IT architecture, the Stuttgart IT Architecture for Manufacturing (SITAM), overcoming the insufficiencies of the traditional information pyramid of manufacturing. We introduce the SITAM architecture and discuss its conceptual components with respect to service-oriented integration, advanced analytics and mobile information provisioning in manufacturing. Moreover, for evaluation purposes, we present a prototypical implementation of the SITAM architecture as well as a real-world application scenario from the automotive industry to demonstrate the benefits of the data-driven factory.

The Smart Real-Time Factory as a Product Service System

In modern manufacturing landscape, companies are increasingly relying on product service systems i.e. bundling of products and services together in order to gain a competitive edge. In this article we present the Smart Real-Time Factory, a smart digital manufacturing environment that can transform the process of production into an informational service for the customers. The different components of the smart factory are discussed at length along with a discussion of the different services that can be offered by the smart factory.

A service-based approach for next-generation Product Lifecycle Management

Nowadays, one of the main challenges for companies is the effective management of IT-systems. In times where requirements and companies change steadily, the IT-infrastructure has to adopt these changes as well: new systems have to be integrated or existing adapted. Even worse, these systems work together to support business processes of a company and, thus, the infrastructures becomes complex and difficult to manage. The same situation is true for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) that accompanies a product development by means of interconnected IT systems running on complex IT infrastructures. This paper introduces a viable solution to the integration of all phases of PLM. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is employed as the service-based integration and communication infrastructure. Three exemplary scenarios are introduced to describe the benefits of using an ESB as compared to alternative PLM infrastructures. Furthermore, we introduce a service hierarchy to enable value-added services to enhance PLM functionality.

SOA-GovMM: A meta model for a comprehensive SOA governance repository

In recent years, the paradigm of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has more and more found its way into many organizations. The SOA principles of loosely coupled and reusable services has convinced decision makers in many organizations to start SOA initiatives. Yet, the lack of proper governance mechanisms has doomed many projects to fail. Although some SOA governance frameworks exist, they differ highly in scope and none of them covers the whole spectrum necessary to properly govern a SOA. In this paper we identify and discuss eleven core areas the governance of a SOA has to cover in order to realize the intended benefit in flexibility and agility. We then analyze and evaluate existing SOA governance frameworks with regard to those requirements. Subsequently, we present a meta model composed of four parts: Service Provider, Service Consumer, Organizational Structure and Business Object. We show, that those four parts cover all requirements for a comprehensive SOA governance repository. This allows an organization to leverage the information integrated in the repository to better govern their SOA and therefore improve the chances of its success.

Cooperative service registries for the service-based Product Lifecycle Management architecture

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) comprises many different tasks across multiple domains, such as product development and production. Thus, multidisciplinary engineering teams have to collaborate to successfully design and produce products. Nowadays, engineers are supported with many software solutions, which are tailored to the work of each engineer. The problem is the missing or bad integration between these IT solutions, which leads to noncontinuous processes and an insufficient cooperation. The Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) supports the needed flexible integration of applications based on services and moreover an automation and integration of processes via workflows. In previous work, we proposed a service-oriented PLM architecture that provides these benefits and supports continuous processes. Thereby, services of different domains and phases of the product life cycle need to collaborate in a distributed fashion. In this paper, we systematically identify, define and rate representative models for the management of corresponding distributed service registries, which enable an efficient collaboration of services. Based on a prototypical implementation of the best-rated model in a layout redesign scenario, we assess our approach for its suitability in PLM. The selected service registry model provides transparent access to all services of different domains and shows the ease of integrating new applications into the product life cycle. It thereby enables an improved cooperation of engineers across various domains to define cross-domain processes.

Advanced Product Lifecycle Management by Introducing Domain-Specific Service Buses

Manufacturing companies are operating today in a turbulent market. Permanently changing preconditions forces the companies to continuously adapt their business and production processes to get the optimal productivity. Therefore, a vast number of IT systems are introduced to support tasks along the product life cycle. These systems are typically isolated and their communication, cooperation and in special cases also integration results in more and more overhead and gets quickly unmanageable. Further problems arise, when building continuous processes within the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The service-based PLM architecture faces these challenges and presents a homogeneous integration approach based on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology. The characteristics and findings of our approach are presented and the inclusion of security features is discussed. A proof-of-concept for the production planning and the corresponding Production Planning Service Bus are presented. Finally, the advantages of the service-based approach compared to traditional integration solutions are pointed out.

A Novel Approach to Product Lifecycle Management based on Service Hierarchies

In grown IT infrastructures for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), applications are mostly interconnected using point-to-point interfaces. This leads to complex and unmanageable infrastructures. A continuous and efficient integration is a key requirement for successful PLM implementations. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a prevalent solution to efficiently integrate legacy applications and systems into business processes. Its possibility for loose coupling of services enables the replacement of point-to-point interfaces, this way reducing the complexity of managing and maintaining the IT infrastructure. This article introduces a SOA-based solution to the integration of all PLM phases. We employ an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as service-based integration and communication infrastructure and introduce three exemplary scenarios to illustrate the benefits of using an ESB as compared to alternative PLM infrastructures. Furthermore, we describe a service hierarchy that extends PLM functionality with value-added services by mapping business processes to data integration services.

The Stuttgart IT Architecture for Manufacturing

The global conditions for manufacturing are rapidly changing towards shorter product life cycles, more complexity and more turbulence. The manufacturing industry must meet the demands of this shifting environment and the increased global competition by ensuring high product quality, continuous improvement of processes and increasingly flexible organization. Technological developments towards smart manufacturing create big industrial data which needs to be leveraged for competitive advantages. We present a novel IT architecture for data-driven manufacturing, the Stuttgart IT Architecture for Manufacturing (SITAM). It addresses the weaknesses of traditional manufacturing IT by providing IT systems integration, holistic data analytics and mobile information provisioning. The SITAM surpasses competing reference architectures for smart manufacturing because it has a strong focus on analytics and mobile integration of human workers into the smart production environment and because it includes concrete recommendations for technologies to implement it, thus filling a granularity gap between conceptual and case-based architectures. To illustrate the benefits of the SITAM’s prototypical implementation, we present an application scenario for value-added services in the automotive industry.

A Service Bus Architecture for Application Integration in the Planning and Production Phases of a Product Lifecycle

Constantly changing business conditions require a high level of flexibility in business processes as well as an adaptive and fully interoperable IT infrastructure in todays manufacturing environments. The lack of flexibility prevents manufacturing companies from improving their responsiveness and adapting their workflows to turbulent scenarios. In order to achieve highly flexible and adaptive workflows, information systems in digital factories and shop floors need to be integrated. The most challenging problem in such manufacturing environments is the high heterogeneity of the IT landscape, where the integration of legacy systems and information silos has led to chaotic architectures over the last two decades. In order to overcome this issue, the authors present a flexible integration platform that allows a loose coupling of distributed services in event-driven manufacturing environments. The proposed approach enables a flexible communication between digital factory and shop floor components by introducing a service bus architecture. This solution integrates an application-independent canonical message format for manufacturing events, content-based routing and transformation services as well as event processing workflows.