In industrial manufacturing, production machines should be reusable for different products to accommodate long machine lifecycles and uncertainties like market fluctuation. For reusability, the control software must be modularized and reconfigurable, for which this paper builds upon previous work regarding dynamic fault handling. The controller executes assigned tasks autonomously while interfacing with the controlled hardware in real time. The present work extends this approach by reconfiguring real-time work distribution and data exchange across multiple PLCs. Thus, a production system can be physically rearranged while the controllers are configured accordingly without software changes. Additionally, real-time communication channels are established, ensuring deterministic communication times of multiple connected PLC devices. The Industry 4.0 consortium has proposed Capabilities, Skills, and Services to decouple the configuration and implementation levels. In compliance with that standard, the main contribution of this work is a concept comprising reconfigurable Skill implementations as described above, their abstract Capability descriptions, and Services accessible via a global coordinator. The implementation level (Skills) complies with IEC 61131-3 and is thus compatible with state-of-the-practice control software. The concept has been successfully validated on a lab-scale manufacturing demonstrator, enabling online process reconfiguration.
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In industrial manufacturing, production machines should be reusable for different products to accommodate long machine lifecycles and uncertainties like market fluctuation. For reusability, the control software must be modularized and reconfigurable, for which this paper builds upon previous work regarding dynamic fault handling. The controller executes assigned tasks autonomously while interfacing with the controlled hardware in real time. The present work extends this approach by reconfiguring...
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