Abstract:
Due to global trends, manufacturing companies are facing a production environment with increasing dynamics. Here, companies have to cope with frequent changes of production requirements and conditions. In order to handle these changes, manufacturing machines have been designed to be more flexible. However, these types of machines require a generic description of their skills which allows a fast feasibility check of new product requirements. Such a description can also support the production planning process and is a crucial element to cope with a dynamic production environment. In this contribution, a product-oriented approach for the description of manufacturing resource skills is presented. The approach aims at facilitating the feasibility check during the quotation phase, as well as reducing the production planning time. The applicability of the concept is illustrated by an example of a gripper and a discussion regarding the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed concept is given.
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Abstract:
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) usually have to cope with open contexts, i.e. the context that these systems interact with through sensors and actuators or communication networks changes its morphology during runtime. For instance, CPS can be deployed in the manufacturing domain to form a modular production system, which, at some time during its lifecycle, might have to produce new products or to interact with new modules, which have been designed by different stakeholders. In order to be able to cope with open contexts, CPSs rely on ontologies that represent the information being shared among them. However, due to the complexity of a CPS's context, building these ontologies as a basis for information exchange during runtime is a non-trivial task that requires a structured approach. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present an ontology building method that is tailored towards the needs of CPS, beginning with ontological requirements and ending with a formal ontology. Second, we apply this method to build an ontology for communicating information between CPSs about processes and machine states in the manufacturing domain.
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