Architectures and technologies for increased agility in small-scale manufacturing systems

The rapid booming of industry 4.0 technologies has been boosting further development of industrial manufacturing systems in the recent two decades. An increasing number of disruptive yet enabling technologies are becoming available for industrial applications. However, while the factories becoming more complex, a proliferation of incompatible systems that have been developed by different vendors or suppliers become a huge challenge to enterprises in reaping the technological advantages. A generalized architecture for integrating various manufacturing systems will be valuable as it’s effectively and efficiently facilitating technology planning, system designing, implementation, maintenance, and upgrading. From the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’ (SMEs) perspective, the implementation of advanced industry 4.0 technologies is crucial to their business survival. It seems impossible to develop a system that can help all SMEs businesses, however, when the vital technology can be developed as a module, more SMEs can quickly get the benefit. Therefore, a generalized architecture for the manufacturing system is needed, so the different vital technologies can be developed as modules and combined to form the various manufacturing systems with the same architecture. There are several novel industry 4.0 technologies that have been studied during this PhD project: in paper 1, a digitized production system control method is introduced for system remote monitoring/supervision and reducing the hardware configuration; in paper 2, a digital twinmodule with the simulation is designed to enhance the development of high level Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) tasks; in paper 3, various interaction methods between digital twin with human have been proposed to promote the usage of the digital twin; in paper 4, a flexible HRC architecture with its demonstration has been proposed to ease the difficulty of the emerging industry 4.0 technologies’ fusion and upgrading; in paper5, an industrial robot universal remote control graphical user interface has been proposed and the experiment showed the operator could program the robot regardless of the geographic distance. This study is directed especially towards SMEs in order to strengthen their business operation and contributes to a sustainable development. The dissertation proposes and develops generalized architectures and selected technologies that can be applied to most current and future manufacturing tasks. The main contributions and effects of my work are: Introducing generalized architectures gives a unified and common framework for enterprises, developers and system integrators to work within. A common language and understanding and a holistic view on the manufacturing operation. Analyzing several Industry 4.0 technologies in terms of availability, complexity and readiness will guide small-scale manufacturing enterprises in their choice of direction when developing their manufacturing system. Presenting several system demonstrations offers a glance at the architecture’s flexibility and gives insight in the power of selected technologies.