Analyzing the industrial scalability of backwards compatible Intralogistics systems

The (re)development of industrial production systems have to deal with high flexibility due to customers' demands as well as constraints such as the dimensions of the manufactory. Therefore, also the Intralogistics system, which transport the goods or products between the machine tools in the production system must be flexibly assembled to fit into the given space. This presuppose that parts of the Intralogistics system, such as a belt conveyor, may be modified or exchanged by different ones, with less effort. Additionally, due to the different lifespan of mechanical, electrical and software components often electrical devices need to be replaced by other ones during the operation, due to lacking availability because of shorter life cycles. Nowadays in industry, a manual adaptation of the control software is necessary after exchanging an electrical/mechanical device with a newer one. In order to ease the software adaptation, in this paper an automatic analysis of differences between incompatible software and an adaptation approach focusing on the functional behavior of the software is introduced. After identifying seven interaction points of control software which need to be adapted the approach is evaluated with an industrial case study and feedback from industrial experts, to proof industrial scalability.     «

The (re)development of industrial production systems have to deal with high flexibility due to customers' demands as well as constraints such as the dimensions of the manufactory. Therefore, also the Intralogistics system, which transport the goods or products between the machine tools in the production system must be flexibly assembled to fit into the given space. This presuppose that parts of the Intralogistics system, such as a belt conveyor, may be modified or exchanged by different ones, wi...     »