itsowl - AWaPro: Automation for adaptive production system

Overall objective of the project

The overall objective of the joint project is to contribute to the realization of adaptive production technology and thus to enable production plants to fulfill requirements that were not thought of in advance. This will be realized using concepts and strategies such as rapid reconfiguration or digital product memory, which are directly related to the future projectIndustry 4.0. The project results will be implemented and validated using demonstration scenarios. At the same time, PHOENIX-CONTACT products available on the market from the field of control and communication technology will be enabled for the realization of transformation-capable production plants. This concerns both the communication interfaces used for the connectivity of components at the field, control and management levels, as well as semantic interoperability at the application level.

Flexible communication planning for PROFINET IRT

An essential prerequisite for the economic realization of transformability in production systems is the reduction of engineering efforts during commissioning and changes in control and communication technology. Due to high real-time requirements, e.g., in highly dynamic motion control systems, communication designed for high performance and synchronism is necessary, which in turn requires precise planning of the communication paths and subscriber configuration in advance. In the event of changes to the configuration, this planning should be made possible without the need for an engineering tool. This requirement additionally necessitates the design and prototypical implementation of a flexible real-time communication system. PROFINET IRT is used as the starting point for the real-time communication system. To realize the flexible real-time communication system, a communication scheduling algorithm will be developed and prototypically implemented to support fast reconfiguration of production equipment.

Image processing using digital models

Another project contribution is the optimization of engineering efforts in optical quality control. Due to the "mass customization" paradigm, the amount of individually manufactured products can increase exponentially. This results in a high engineering effort to teach vision systems, especially when the manufacturing of a reference object is necessary.

Currently, a digital model necessary for production is created during product configuration, consisting of data such as the CAD model, color specifications or information for labeling, among other things. Approaches are being developed for adaptive optical quality control that perform automatic extraction of relevant information using the digital model as a feature base. The knowledge derived from this can be used to teach image processing systems.