Report on decentralized control & Distributed Manufacturing Operation Systems for Flexible and Reconfigurable production environments

Increasing uncertainties and rapidly -changing conditions in the market are challenging the Manufacturing sector. Thus, new paradigms need to be adopted for flexible and reconfigurable production systems. They can enable the integration robots and flexible machinery into complex and distributed production environments in order to monitor and control production and distribution processes. This leads to an optimization of resource utilization and increases safety of more and more human oriented workspaces. This task will collect and classify different decentralized distributed control approaches covering the state of the art approaches used in the use cases. They consist of the existing integrated tools on the corresponding levels from the shop floor up to the top floor. This covers the communication between these tools, which is based on industrial as well as IT communication protocols along with the data representation standards used. Two main areas will be addressed; the first will focus on the advantage from the industry perspective in utilizing flexible machinery and robots in the production floor considering implications of existing components being already present (Siemens, WHR, PRIMA, GKN). The second area to be addressed will deal with the identification of features coming from scalable architectures that enable optimized and collaborative workspaces in manufacturing which can be oriented to processes and users (POLIMI IPB UNINOVA). The latter aspect will be an integrated part and to some extent also a prerequisite for integrating new innovative production systems into manufacturing.