ABSTRACT
The increasing global competition, the rapid introduction of new products, and quick changes in customer needs and demands (Cala et al. 2016) led the market to be more unpredictable than before and, consequently, new challenges in manufacturing sectors are required. On the client side, the demand for more customized, cheaper, and higher-quality products is driving the manufacturing companies to search for innovative development and production approaches to match those requirements. On the company side, disturbances such as delays or shortages from suppliers or resources breakdowns may have a deep impact on company performances. In addition, there is the constant need for reduction of production costs imposing processes to be more efficient and sustainable (Cala et al. 2016).
Therefore, it is clear that the traditional production systems based on rigid predefined functionalities are no longer suited to cope with this competitive market and with its variability and unpredictability. The current manufacturing control systems based on centralized or hierarchical control structures do not support efficiently the requirements of flexibility and reconfigurability, since they present a weak response to change to production needs and to highly dynamic variations (Boschi et al. 2016).
The solution to such issues will force companies to redesign their manufacturing systems that, using smarter manufacturing equipment, not only produce higher-quality products at lower costs, but are also able to quickly and effectively respond to rapid changes in their environment, even enabling production to continue despite the failure of single components (Boschi et al. 2016).
Thus, a migration from traditional production systems characterized by vertical applications, centralized approach, and rigidity to agile plug-and-produce systems that are dynamically adaptable to changing production conditions open to new features and functions, flexible to different processing tasks, modular to enable quick and economical changes, and able to support new business processes and go-to-market strategies is needed (Delsing et al. 2012), see also Chapter 6 of (ETSI world class standards 2009).
To face these challenges, the manufacturing industry, eager as well to recover from the crisis started in 2008, is addressing innovative paradigms, namely industrial Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, and Industrial Cyber-Physical System (ICPS). They represent different areas of action and research aiming to move from traditional approaches toward intelligent manufacturing control and automation systems that are reconfigurable, adaptable to changing production environment, and flexible to support business needs. These paradigms are supported by the implementation of new enabling technologies and intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Plug-and-Produce systems, and Edge/Cloud technologies that have been developed in a variety of research fields (Colombo et al. 2014).
In this context, PERFoRM1 (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) (EU HORIZON2020 FoF PERFoRM 2015–2018) aims to facilitate the conceptual transformation of existing production systems toward plug-and-produce production systems in order to achieve a flexible manufacturing environments based on rapid and seamless reconfiguration of machinery and robots in response to operational or business events.
These objectives require research activities to implement a solid manufacturing middleware component based on encapsulation and digitalization of production resources and assets according to existing paradigms (e.g. cyber-physical systems (CPSs), service-based architectures, cloud services, etc.), the development of advanced and modular global monitoring and optimization algorithms for reconfiguration of machinery, robots, and processes, and, finally, to ensure the full interoperability, harmonization, and standardization of methods and protocols to enable the plug-and-produce readiness in heterogeneous and legacy environments.
The PERFoRM approach proposes an innovative architectural framework, encompassing industrial assets, industrial processes, and new industry oriented integration middleware components, able to provide a global view of different manufacturing scenarios, for different kinds of business applications, and enabling integration with existing production components and systems.
As described in Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, four industrial use cases (i.e. compressor, automotive, home appliance, and aerospace) and two test beds are deployed proving the applicability of the proposed approach in a wide range of manufacturing environments belonging to different industrial domains, product complexity, production volume, and processing types in order to validate this approach for different kinds of industry needs.
