Design Automation for Smart Factories

The paper titled A Software Architecture to Control Service-Oriented Manufacturing Systems, authored by Sebastiano Gaiardelli, Stefano Spellini, Marco Panato, and Franco Fummi, has been accepted as an interactive presentation at the 2022 IEEE/ACM Conference on Design Automation and Testing in Europe (DATE).

This paper presents a software architecture extending the classical automation pyramid to control and reconfigure flexible, service-oriented manufacturing systems. At the Planning level, the architecture requires a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) consistent with the International Society Automation (ISA) standard. Then, the Supervisory level is automated by introducing a novel component, called Automation Manager. The new component interacts upward with the MES, and downward with a set of servers providing access to the manufacturing machines. The communication with machines relies on the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard protocol, which allows exposing production tasks as ``services’’.

The proposed software architecture has been prototyped to control a real production line, originally controlled by a commercial MES, unable to fully exploit the flexibility provided by the case study manufacturing system. Meanwhile, the proposed architecture is fully exploiting the production line’s flexibility.