Publications - Conferences

07 Oct 2016
SOHOMA 2016: Instantiating the PERFoRM System Architecture for Industrial Case Studies
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The PERFoRM project, an innovation action promoted under the scopeof the EU Horizon 2020 program, advocates the use of an Industrie 4.0 compliant system architecture for the seamless reconfiguration of robots and machinery. The system architecture re-uses the innovative results from previous successful R&D projects on distributed control systems domain, such as SOCRADES, IMCAESOP, GRACE and IDEAS. This paper, after describing the main pillars of the PERFoRM system architecture, focuses in mapping the system architecture into four industrial use cases aiming to validate the system architecture design before its deployment in the real environments.
07 Oct 2016
SOHOMA 2016: A Highly Flexible, Distributed Data Analysis Framework for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing System
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In modern manufacturing, high volumes of data are con- stantly being generated by the manufacturing processes. However, only a small percentage is actually used in a meaningful way. As part of the H2020 PERFoRM project, which follows the Industry 4.0 vision and targets the seamless reconfiguration of robots and machin- ery, this paper proposes a framework for the implementation of a highly flexible, pluggable and distributed data acquisition and analysis system, which can be used for both supporting run-time decision making and triggering self-adjustment methods, allowing corrections to be made be- fore failures actually occur, therefore reducing the impact of such events in production.
07 Oct 2016
SOHOMA 2016: A description and analysis method for reconfigurable production systems
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New production systems are highly reconfigurable and interact with dy-namic industrial environments. Their modelling, simulation and analysis of the opera-tions and evaluation of performances are now much more complex than in the past when system had a static and predefined behavior. This paper proposes a formalism to describe complex production systems, based on utilization of FSA (Finite Status Au-tomaton). This approach is enabling better understanding and sharing with stakeholders of how a system works, but it is also a good basis for computer based simulation and control. The interaction with external environments is structured in terms of External Events (inputs) and Trigger Outputs. The analysis of the system status evolution pro-vides the possibility to calculate KPIs in specific conditions or their evolution along the time. In the paper it is proposed a simplified description language to describe the au-tomaton including output generation and triggering of other functions of the production environment. The approach is implemented and demonstrated in a particular industrial domain: industrial machinery fabrication sector.
11 Oct 2017
ISSE´17: Evaluation of Migration Scenarios towards Cyber-Physical Production Systems using SysML
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Over the last decades several technologies have been developed towards the distributed automation architecture for Smart Factories, however, these technologies have not been yet implemented in industry. Manufacturers are quite conservative in adopting new technologies because the vast majority of existing infrastructures already have constraints in place related to their investment capabilities and to the integration of new technologies with their legacy systems and processes. To overcome this conservatism, migration strategies and decision-making approaches are required to support industry in adopting the next generation of smart production systems step by step, taking into account not only the technical aspects, but also integrating organizational and economical issues. One essential part of these approaches is the comparative evaluation of migration options. Based on model-based systems engineering (MBSE), this paper proposes an approach that supports the evaluation of possible migration scenarios towards cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) by using the System Modeling Language (SysML).
16 May 2018
CIRP´18: Validation of PERFoRM reference architecture demonstrating an application of data mining for predicting machine failure
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The PERFoRM project aims to develop a reference architecture for Agile Manufacturing Control systems for plug-and-produce devices, robots and machines. The aim of the work is to improve the flexibility of the mechanical manufacturing of the housing parts involved in the production of industrial compressors and gas separators. An industrial emonstrator has been designed to implement a Data Analytics tool that provieds roles benefical for root cause analysis and a descision support system for early prediction of the failure. The tool also identifies key alarms for monitoringthe machine condition.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Integrating Material Flow Simulation Tools in a Service-oriented Industrial Context
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In this paper a generic simulation environment is introduced that allows the integration of commercial and research-based simulation tools in a service-oriented manufacturing environment, such as in Industrie 4.0 factories, to support in flexible reconfiguration and scheduling decisions. For this purpose, the simulation environment is connected to a generic middleware and processes parameterized simulation requests via automated model generation and execution, based on current shop floor conditions. Those simulation requests are formulated in a standardized description language for production systems, in this case a derivative of AutomationML (AML) that was extended by simulation specific data sets. Therefore, the Simulation Environment comprises different tooland non-tool-specific functionalities and components that allow the integration of simulation tools into industrial IT platform environments.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Integrating Material Flow Simulation Tools in a Service-oriented Industrial Context
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In this paper a generic simulation environment is introduced that allows the integration of commercial and research-based simulation tools in a service-oriented manufacturing environment, such as in Industrie 4.0 factories, to support in flexible reconfiguration and scheduling decisions. For this purpose, the simulation environment is connected to a generic middleware and processes parameterized simulation requests via automated model generation and execution, based on current shop floor conditions. Those simulation requests are formulated in a standardized description language for production systems, in this case a derivative of AutomationML (AML) that was extended by simulation specific data sets. Therefore, the Simulation Environment comprises different tooland non-tool-specific functionalities and components that allow the integration of simulation tools into industrial IT platform environments.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Validation of PERFoRM reference architecture demonstrating an automatic robot reconfiguration application
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The PERFoRM project aims to develop a common reference architecture for Agile Manufacturing Control systems for true plug-and-produce devices, robots and machines. The aim of the work described in this paper is to validet the concepts of the reference architecture in the context of the production of home appliances. A demonstrator has been designed and implemented to illustrate the automatic reconfiguration of the path of a robot equipped with a probe for the detection of microwave leaks coming from a oven.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Migration from Traditional towards Cyber-Physical Production Systems
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Nowadays, many organizations intend to convert their existing production systems towards ones that are characterized by adaptability, openness, flexibility and modularity. This requires a redesign of existing information processing systems especially related to control, leading possibly to cyber-physical production systems (CPPS). However, the implementation of new control technologies will have a direct impact on the normal operational status of production while engineers will also face several challenges and obstacles in adopting intelligent automation systems. New step-wise migration strategies are required to holistically support industries in their journey towards CPPS taking into account technical, economic and social aspects. This paper discusses the migration state-of-the-art strategies, analyzing them and providing a first attempt to define a migration approach for innovative production systems.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: A harmonized approach for constructing of robust and efficient technology backbone for a next generation of agile manufacturing systems
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To quickly satisfy customer needs and to respond to market changes it is eminent to develop agile manufacturing systems. These have to support integration of flexible and reconfigurable production systems as well as IT technologies across the entire value chain. While implementing advanced technologies or integrating these into new system solutions, manufacturers and system developers have to understand the current and the desired technological capabilities of the system application. Before constructing a robust technology backbone for agile manufacturing systems, it is therefore important to make a clear picture of existing standardized solutions. Though a vast variety of assessment techniques is presented in literature, it is still unclear which approach is appropriate for a technology gap analysis, especially when developing agile manufacturing system solutions. Therefore, the harmonization of assessment techniques is essential for the analysis of the technological compliance among various systems. This paper presents a harmonized approach with exemplary results in order to navigate system developers and stakeholders towards effective and robust technology solutions that are compliant with Industry
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Dynamic Monitoring of Key-Performance Indicators in Industrial Environments
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Manufacturing companies generate huge amounts of relevant data that, potentially, can help the decision makers to monitor and supervise the health status of the shop-floor. Many problems are present that prevent this monitoring, namely the identification of which data should be collected, how to execute this collection or how this data should be analysed and displayed to the user. This paper deals with the last issue, where a dynamic and responsive User Interface is developed enabling the decision maker, having an in-the-mesh intervention, to constantly monitor relevant Key-Performance Indicators (KPI). The paper describes the development of such tool, considering a webbased approach under a platform agnostic perspective. The user interface presents an dynamic view over the aggregated KPI, where data is annotated with relevant warning information.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Agent-based Reconfiguration in a Micro-flow Production Cell
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The world is moving towards to the fourth industrial revolution, usually linked with the Industrie 4.0 initiative, enables the digitization of manufacturing factories by using Cyber- Physical Systems and emergent technologies like Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The seamless reconfiguration of these complex industrial cyber-physical systems is an important challenge for the complete implementation of this revolution, being necessary to re-think the way such mechanisms can be designed and engineered. This paper presents an agentbased reconfiguration system for the dynamic and seamless reconfiguration of a physically-reconfigurable modular micro-flow production system in the area of manufacturing of aerospace engine components.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: A standard approach to production systems modelling based on Finite State Automata
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Simulation has been used for decades as a tool to support decision making in manufacturing systems. It is far cheaper and faster to build a virtual system and experiment with different scenarios and decisions before actually implementing the system. Simulation has been widely used to support decisions in manufacturing systems’ operations and configuration. Nevertheless, knowing the changeable nature of manufacturing systems that is affecting the current production environment due to smart technologies adoption and market demands, a new approach to model a typical production system based on a modular and lean paradigm is needed to make the simulation methodologies aligned with “fast reconfiguration” paradigm. In this context, the objective of this paper is to propose a novel approach to create a production model leading to speed-up the simulation of the dynamic behaviour of a flexible and reconfigurable production system. In the first part of this paper, a modular representation of a generic production line is proposed based on a reduced standard set of components. In particular, independent standard entities representing each actor involved within a typical production line (i.e. machines, buffers, etc) are introduced. Moreover, presenting the rules that regulate how these entities can interoperate each other, and a modular, scalable and interoperable model to develop an adaptive, changeable simulation activity is shown. Finally, the instantiation of specific configuration based on different modular entities, using Finite State Automata (FSA) formalism and its application on Industrial use case is depicted; implemented configurations can be executed on different technology platforms (MS-Excel/VBA, Matlab- Symulink or others).
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Introducing agent-based simulation of manufacturing systems to industrial discrete-event simulation tools
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Growing competition and increasing market dynamics dorce manufacturing companines to increase flexibility in their manufacturing systems. Thus, new approaches, which exceed the limitations of traditional manufacturing systems, are needed. This also requires rethinking the simulation mdeling behind those systems. However, simulation software tools used in industry, referred to as industrial grade software tools, and actually used simulation models are not sufficient for this purpose. Therefore, this paper aims at building up an agentbased simulation model of a flexible manufacturing system in an industrial grade software tool. For that aim, a general three-step approach for implementing an agent-based logic into an industrial grade discrete-event simulation tool is presented. An exemplary application is based on a matrix-structured manufacturing system that provieds by its structure and by the individual acting entities a flexible and scable approach without a fixed cycle time. The example is modeled within the industrial grade discrete-event simulation software Tecnomatix Plant Simulation and compared to a reference model, recreating the same results with smal deviations.
24 Jul 2017
INDIN´17: Specification and design of an industrial manufacturing middleware
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The European innovation project PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) is aiming for a harmonized integration of research results in the area of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems. Based on the cyber-physical system (CPS) paradigm, existing technologies and concepts are researched and integrated in an architecture which is enabling the application of these new technologies in real industrial environments. To implement such a flexible cyber-physical system, one of the core requirements for each involved component is a harmonized communication, which enables the capability to collaborate with each other in an intelligent way. But especially when integrating multiple already existing production components into such a cyber-physical system, one of the major issues is to deal with the various communication protocols and data representations coming with each individual cyber-physical component. To tackle this issue, the solution foreseen within PERFoRM’s architecture is to use an integration platform, the PERFoRM Industrial Manufacturing Middleware, to enable all connected components to interact with each other through the Middleware and without having to implement new interfaces for each. This paper describes the basic requirements of such a Middleware and how it fits into the PERFoRM architecture and gives an overview about the internal design and functionality.
26 Oct 2016
IECON 2016: Assessment of industrial middleware technologies for the PERFoRM project
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To meet the increasing requirements which are set for modern production systems regarding flexibility, reconfigurability and collaborative behavior, a common information, Communication & Control (ICT) platform for guaranteeing connectivity has to be put in place. Industrial Middleware, i.e. SW/HW solutions, which help connecting and mediating different industrial cyber-physical components of a distributed system (such as a production system) are an essential component of such a platform.The paper describes the assessment of existing industrial Middleware solutions which are targeting re-configurability and connectivity of modern industrial environments. It states a set of important functional requirements which need to be considered to select the right solution for individual use cases. A big emphasis is put into finding industrially applicable solutions.
26 Oct 2016
IECON 2016: Specification of the PERFoRM Architecture for the Seamless Production System Reconfiguration
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The world is assisting to the fourth industrial revolution, with several domains of science and technology being strongly developed and, specially, being integrated with each other, allowing to build evolvable complex systems. Data digitization, big-data analysis, distributed control, Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and self-organization, amongst others, are playing an important role in this journey. This paper considers the best practices from previous successful European projects addressing distributed control systems to develop an innovative architecture that can be industrially deployed. For this purpose, a particular design process has to be addressed in order to consider the requirements and functionalities from various use cases. To investigate the known practices, four use cases are enlighted in this paper, which cover a wide spectrum of the European industrial force, as well as industrial standards to support a smooth migration from traditional systems to the emergent distributed systems.
26 Oct 2016
IECON 2016: Selection of a Data Exchange Format for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Systems
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With the emergence of the Industry 4.0 concept, or the fourth industrial revolution, the industry is bearing witness to the appearance of more and more complex systems, often requiring the integration of various new heterogeneous, modular and intelligent elements with pre-existing legacy devices. This challenge of interoperability is one of the main concerns taken into account when designing such systems-of-systems, commonly requiring the use of standard interfaces to ensure this seamless integration. To aid in tackling this challenge, a common format for data exchange should be adopted. Thus, a study to select the foundations for the development of such a format is hereby presented, taking into account the specific needs of four different use cases representing varied key European industry sectors.
26 Oct 2016
IECON 2016: Functional Requirements for Reconfigurable and Flexible Cyber-Physical System
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A truly global market characterized by aggressive competition on a global scale and rapid changes in process technology requires creating production systems that are easy to upgrade, being able to readily integrate new technologies and new functions. In these terms, PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) a European funded project, aims at developing an innovative manufacturing system based on a new agile concept introducing the implementation of methods and methodologies for transforming existing production systems into plug-and-produce production ones based on Cyber-Physical Systems technologies. In particular, this paper aims at describing a methodology leading to identification and deployment of general business and strategic requirements needed to implement new plug-and-produce paradigms into traditional production systems. This approach mainly based on the Requirement Engineering methodology (RE) also leads to the identification of an appropriate set of KPIs (technical and business) able to measure and to benchmark collected requirements. Four Industrial Use Cases have been analyzed, taking the CPS-5C architecture as reference model to map their AS-IS and TO-BE situations with respect to their CPS attitude, confirming the possibility to use this approach among different manufacturing sectors, for large companies, SMEs as well as for new and existing small plants.
26 Oct 2016
IECON 2016: Exploring the integration of the human as a flexibility factor in CPS enabled manufacturing environments: methodology and results
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Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are expected to shape the evolution of production towards the fourth industrial revolution named Industry 4.0. The increasing integration of manufacturing processes and the strengthening of the autonomous capabilities of manufacturing systems make investigating the role of humans a primary research objective in view of emerging social and demographic megatrends. Understanding how the employees can be better integrated to enable increased flexibility in manufacturing systems is a prerequisite to allow technological solutions, as well as humans, to harness their full potential. Humans can supervise and adjust the settings, be a source of knowledge and competences, can diagnose situations, take decisions and several other activities influencing manufacturing performances, overall providing additional degrees of freedom to the systems. This paper, studies two different integration models: Human-in-the-Loop and Human-in-the-Mesh. They are both analysed in the context of four industrial cases of deployment of cyber physical systems in production.
27 Oct 2016
IECON 2016: Towards Industrial Exploitation of Innovative and Harmonized Production Systems
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Industrial competitiveness today means shorter product lifecycles, increased product variety and shorter time-tomarket. To face this challenge, the manufacturing industry is forced by different initiatives, namely Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0 and Cyber-Physical System to move from traditional control approaches towards intelligent manufacturing control systems that are dynamically adaptable to changing production environment and flexible to different processing tasks. For years several emergent intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems, Service-oriented Architecture, Plug-and- Produce systems and Cloud technologies have been developed in a variety of research fields. This paper reviews the state-of-theart methodologies and technologies of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems outlining the differences between them and arising benefits within the vision of the PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) project. Current trends and challenges in industrial implementation of these methodologies are reported and research opportunities are described.
27 Jun 2017
FAIM´17: Integration and Deployment of an Industrial Architecture for the PERFoRM Project
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To meet flexibility and reconfigurability requirements, modern production systems need hardware and software solutions which ease the connection and mediation of different and heterogonous industrial cyber-physical components. Following the vision of Industry 4.0, the H2020 PERFoRM project targets, particularly, the seamless reconfiguration of robots and machinery. This paper describes the implementation of a highly flexible, pluggable and distributed architecture solution, focusing on several building blocks, particularly a distributed middleware, a common data model and standard interfaces and technological adapters, which can be used for connecting legacy systems (such as databases) with simulation, visualization and reconfiguration tools.
27 Jun 2017
FAIM´17: Advanced use of data as an enabler for adaptive production control using mathematical optimization – an application of Industry 4.0 principles
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This paper deals with the need for more advanced and mathematically based planning and scheduling tools for production systems with complex flows which are subjected to constant change. To develop and utilise such tools, better data acquisition and aggregation from the operational level on the shop floor is needed. An information infrastructure has been proposed to enable this novel type of optimized adaptive scheduling to achieve significant improvements in production efficiency. The solution is based on a system architecture and an information infrastructure with a middleware that provides a specific production cell with all the data relevant for scheduling.

Publications - Journals

27 Jun 2018
Computers and Industrial Engineering´18: Placing the operator at the centre of Industry 4.0 design: Modelling and assessing human activities within cyber-physical systems
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The Industry 4.0 vision, grounded on the integration of key technologies and Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPSs), is expected to profoundly modify the manufacturing sector. There is large consensus on the fact that work will change and different skills will be needed. However, whether the organization of work will evolve towards higher responsibility and decision-making of the employees or towards higher technological control is still an open question. The challenge is how to govern this evolution and purposely guide the process of integrating people within CPSs in order to move towards the desired scenario. This paper addresses this challenge, by proposing a methodology to support the design and assessment of different work configurations, jointly considering the uniqueness of human labour and the characteristics of cyber-physical production within a comprehensive framework. The method covers ordinary production as well as irregular scenarios, such as failure detection or maintenance intervention, particularly interesting for human work. The applicability of the method is illustrated through two industrial cases, leading to suggestions for training the personnel and for enhancing the whole cyber- physical-social system. Results include human-centric Key Performance indicators (KPIs) and general guidelines for work design. The approach encourages managers and engineers to clarify their strategy for human resources; develops a multi-perspective awareness on the role of workers; fosters an early detection of possible misalignment between the high-level strategies and the technical interventions on the shop floor. The modelling, analysis and assessment technique developed aims at representing a first step towards formal and quantitative methods to support the design of human work integrated within cyber-physical-systems.

Other Documents

28 Sep 2018
Deliverable 11.4
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Report on Standardization, Community Building and Innovation Transfer Activities 2nd Release
01 Sep 2017
Deliverable 11.3
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Report on exploitation strategies and use of project results, 1st iteration
30 Sep 2018
Deliverable 11.2
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Plan for Disseminating and Using Foreground Knowledge (PDUF) 2nd Release
Download: D2_1_public.pdf
03 Feb 2017
Deliverable 11.1
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Fundamental dissemination material
03 Feb 2017
Deliverable 6.3
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Report on Self-Adaptive Large Scale Demonstrator Design and Set-Up
Download: D6_3_public.pdf
29 Mar 2017
Deliverable 6.2
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Self-Adaptive Highly Modular and Flexible Assembly Demonstrator Design and Set-Up
Download: D6_2_public.pdf
27 Sep 2016
Deliverable 6.1
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Report on Self-Adaptive Machines Demonstrator Design and Set-up
Download: D6_1_public.pdf
29 Sep 2018
Deliverable 5.3
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The PERFoRM migration strategy for a generic migration scenario and for additional show cases within the test beds in WP 6. 2nd Release
Download: D2_1_public.pdf
25 Sep 2017
Deliverable 5.2
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The PERFoRM Migration Strategy for A Generic Migration Scenario and for Additional Show Cases within the Testbeds in WP6 1st Release
Download: D5_2_public.pdf
28 Sep 2017
Deliverable 5.1
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The PERFoRM Integration Approach
Download: D5_1_public.pdf
03 Feb 2017
Deliverable 4.4
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Guidelines and recommendations for reconfigurability mechanisms for machinery and robots
Download: D4_4_public.pdf
31 May 2017
Deliverable 4.3
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Decision rules and KPI and Functionality Visualizations
Download: D4_3_public.pdf
02 Feb 2017
Deliverable 4.2
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Planning procedures for energy and agent-based planning and (re)-scheduling
Download: D4_2_public.pdf
01 Feb 2017
Deliverable 4.1
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Harmonization of generic simulation and specific parameterized models into one Simulation Environment
Download: D4_1_public.pdf
14 Jun 2017
Deliverable 3.3
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Human Expert Knowledge Capture and Interpretation
Download: D3_3_public.pdf
26 Oct 2016
Deliverable 3.2
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Real-time Process Information Exploitation
Download: D3_2_public.pdf
23 Jan 2017
Deliverable 2.3
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Specification of the Generic Interfaces for Machinery, Control Systems and Data Backbone
Download: D2_3_public.pdf
28 Sep 2016
Deliverable 2.2
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Definition of the System Architecture
Download: D2_2_public.pdf
29 Mar 2016
Deliverable 2.1
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Guidelines for seamless integration of Humans as flexibility driver in flexible production systems
Download: D2_1_public.pdf
29 Mar 2016
Deliverable 1.2
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Requirements for Innovative Production System Functional requirement analysis and definition of strategic objectives and KPIs
Download: D1_2_public.pdf
30 Mar 2016
Deliverable 1.1
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Report on decentralized control & Distributed Manufacturing Operation Systems for Flexible and Reconfigurable production environments
Download: D1_1_public.pdf