Leveraging the agility of manufacturing chains by combining process-oriented production planning and service-oriented manufacturing automation

Globalization, rising product variety, the need for continuously improving productivity and quality demand higher agility of manufacturing systems. Well-known principles like encapsulating functionality into mechatronic systems to enable reuse and standardization are basic approaches to gain agility in manufacturing environments. However, there is a lack of a holistic communication architecture for manufacturing systems and an overall concept to organize the continuously changing production planning and control processes. The paradigm of service-oriented architectures emerged as a concept to increase the flexibility and reuse within IT environments by using software modules with standardized communication interfaces. Transferring this paradigm to the field of manufacturing offers a unique opportunity to complement the advances of standardized communication interfaces and mechatronic encapsulation with powerful production planning and control methods. In this paper the central aspects and the potentials of transferring service-oriented paradigms from IT to automation are discussed. The methodology of process-oriented manufacturing planning is presented as the organizational fundament for an efficient establishment of service-oriented manufacturing systems. An approach for a process-oriented factory model is presented as the basis for a process-oriented planning process. Furthermore, a technical demonstrator that provides the opportunity for evaluating SOA technologies and our new planning approach is shown