An Open Distributed Architecture for Flexible Hybrid Assembly Systems: A Model Driven Engineering Approach
This work addresses the need for more adaptable and reconfigurable assembly systems in industrial automation, though it is incremental as it specializes and extends existing frameworks.
The authors tackled the engineering of evolvable flexible hybrid assembly systems by proposing an open distributed architecture based on model-driven development, which uses specific meta-models and a domain-specific tool to facilitate system construction, building on previous work in embedded industrial automation systems.
Assembly systems constitute one of the most important fields in today industry. In this paper we propose an open distributed architecture for the engineering of evolvable flexible hybrid assembly systems. The proposed architecture is based on the model driven development paradigm. Models are used to represent structure and behavior and a domain specific engineering tool is defined to facilitate the assembly system engineer in the engineering process of the assembly system. Specific meta models are defined to capture domain knowledge to guide the engineer in the construction of the models required to construct the assembly system. This work is a specialization of our previous work that defined a SOA based framework for embedded industrial automation systems. It adapts and extends, in the assembly systems domain, the 3+1 SysML-view model architecture defined for the engineering of mechatronics Manufacturing systems. The proposed architecture can be used to develop a framework for evolvable flexible and reconfigurable assembly systems that would exploit the benefits the Cyber Physical paradigm utilizing web technologies, the IoT, the Cloud computing and Big Data.