Towards flexible and adaptive productions systems based on virtual cloud-based control

Abstract

In order to cope with changing markets and reduced product life-cycles production systems need to get more adaptive and allow to easily introduce new products and product variants. Current solutions require that all control equipment need to be modified in such cases. In this work we propose a different approach with a strong separation of basic control of production resources from product specific behavior. The product specific behavior is managed by a central control entity which sends parts of the execution tree required for a certain to thin controllers managing the production resources. With this approach we can on one hand achieve the needed flexibility and at the other hand side achieve the timing requirements of production.