Factory of the Future: A Service-oriented System of Modular, Dynamic Reconfigurable and Collaborative Systems

The work presented in this chapter shows directions to achieve dynamism by means of SOA introduction in all layers, increased collaboration and close coupling of production sites and enterprise systems.

Abstract

Modern enterprises operate on a global scale and depend on complex business processes performed in highly distributed production systems. Business continuity needs to be guaranteed, while changes at some or many of the distributed shop-floors should happen on-the-fly without stopping the production process as a whole. Unfortunately, there are limits and barriers that hinder the business requirements in beating tackled timely in the shop-floors due to missing modularity, agile reconfigurability, collaboration and open communication among the systems. However, as the number of sophisticated networked embedded devices in the shop-floors increases, service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts can now be pushed down from the upper information technology level to the device level, and provide a better collaboration between the business systems and the production systems. This leads to highly modular, dynamic reconfigurable factories that build a collaborative system of systems that can adapt and optimize its behaviour to achieve the business goals. The work presented in this chapter shows directions to achieve this dynamism by means of SOA introduction in all layers, increased collaboration and close coupling of production sites and enterprise systems.