Model-Driven Design and Development of Flexible Automated Production Control Configurations for Industry 4.0

Abstract

The continuous changes of the market and customer demands have forced modern automation systems to provide stricter Quality of service (QoS) requirements. This work is centered in automation production system flexibility, understood as the ability to shift from one controller configuration to a different one, in the most quick and cost-effective way, without disrupting its normal operation. In the manufacturing field, this allows to deal with non-functional requirements such as assuring control system availability or workload balancing, even in the case of failure of a machine, components, network or controllers. Concretely, this work focuses on flexible applications at production level, using Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) as primary controllers. The reconfiguration of the control system is not always possible as it depends on the process state. Thus, an analysis of the system state is necessary to make a decision. In this sense, architectures based on industrial Multi Agent Systems (MAS) have been used to provide this support at runtime. Additionally, the introduction of these mechanisms makes the design and the implementation of the control system more complex. This work aims at supporting the design and development of such flexible automation production systems, through the proposed model-based framework. The framework consists of a set of tools that, based on models, automate the generation of control code extensions that add flexibility to the automation production system, according to industry 4.0 paradigm.