Architecting Ubiquitous Communication and Collaborative-Automation-Based Machine Network Systems for Flexible Manufacturing

Creative integration of smarter machines with new emerging information and communication technologies in manufacturing industry allows collaborative automation between machines and promises greater production flexibility and product variability. The ubiquitous machine-to-machine messaging, intermachine understanding, and system modeling are key enabling techniques to empower machine interoperability for flexible manufacturing systems. However, the heterogeneities in machine part platforms, production strategies, and product variability keep the rich sensing and communication-intensive subsystems from seamless integration. By highlighting the specificities of industrial networks, this investigation aims to gain manufacturing flexibility by constructing a collaborative-automation-based industrial network from the system and software perspective, focusing on: 1) the modeling of machine interactions in communication-intensive industrial networks; 2) machine modularization and decentralized structure for production-line-scale efficiency; 3) ubiquitous messaging and understanding for machine interoperability; and 4) model-based management for application-level adaptation and flexibility. The presented technical solutions have been implemented in the PickNPack food manufacturing line, and the results demonstrate their feasibility.