Towards Coordinating Production Reconfiguration

Abstract

The engineering of production systems requires capabilities for the coordinated reconfiguration between production variants, i.e., Product-Process-Resource (PPR) variants with multi-disciplinary dependencies. However, traditional approaches to coordinate reconfiguration, e.g., scripted workflows, consider production dependencies implicitly and require validation regarding multi-disciplinary PPR dependencies. This vision paper explores knowledge representation to coordinate production re-configuration with Industry 4.0 components. For validating pre-and post-conditions of a flexible, coordinated reconfiguration process, we introduce the PPR Asset Network with Reconfiguration (PAN+R) approach, which builds on the PPR Asset Network (PAN) to represent PPR model variants with their dependencies and states in transition between variants. We initially evaluate the PAN+R approach with a use case on a work cell for joining car parts. We conclude with a research agenda towards coordinating production reconfiguration with human and machine agents.