Reference Architectures for Future Production Systems in the Field of Discrete Manufacturing

Today's companies are increasingly confronted with changes within their daily field of business, caused by new trends like digitalization as well as the manufacturing of customer specific products and the associated flexible production of smaller lot sizes. To deal with those trends, future production systems need to offer a more flexible approach for the discrete manufacturing of goods. In order to provide guidance for all relevant stakeholders concerned with the future implementation of concrete Industry 4.0 systems, which can fulfill those new trends, a reference architecture is considered valuable. The creation of such reference architectures is based on the application of architecture frameworks. A reference architecture captures the basic, production-process independent functions and logics and can be used as a starting point for setting up a concrete system architecture. For the purpose of identifying existing reference architecture solutions and detecting possible gaps as well as to define potential research needs, a corresponding literature search is conducted. Based on different search terms potential reference architectures and models are selected and analyzed.