Plug&Produce Integration of Components into OPC UA based data-space

Abstract

Current manufacturing and production systems are becoming more flexible and adaptable. Such systems demand rapid changeover and short configuration time of machines. With the adaptation of IT systems in the automation industry, machines and devices will have self-descriptive semantic device data description to represent their data elements and services. This paper proposes an approach to integrate new machines and devices into an existing production system without any manual intervention. The proposed concept provides a Plug & Produce system architecture and evaluates its capabilities based on OPC UA. The concept also describes an easy and fast integration of the digital representation of new field devices into an existing production system.