Specification of the generic interfaces for machinery, control systems and data backbone

This task will design the generic interfaces for machinery, control systems and data backbone that are part of a decentralized production system, based on the knowledge and insights gathered from previous EU FP7 projects, such as IDEAS, PRIME, GRACE and IMC-AESOP. Different types of (hardware and software) production components, as defined in WP1, will be considered in this task. To allow a generic usage of standards, a differentiation between generic requirements (valid for all entities) and complementary requirements (depends on type or application) is envisaged. This is a crucial aspect, keeping in mind the enormous amount of different type of entities in a production system. Beside automated manufacturing and assembly machines, testing equipment for quality control and manual processes need to be considered. The interface enables the component to describe itself (What am I? What are my capabilities? What materials, weights, dimensions, fixings, etc. can I handle? Etc.). For this purpose, proper component description must be defined using current standards, e.g. AutomationML or ontologies, which can be extended to include particular functionalities, e.g. operational data. In particular, some work in this issue was already developed in the EU FP7 IDEAS project, which will be considered here. The identified lacks of such work will be improved to accomplish the defined industrial requirements and objectives. This task works closely with task 2.4 since the standard interfaces must be well aligned with the standards for the middleware. This is the reason why UNINOVA and HSEL are strong participants in these two tasks. Regarding the aspects of the standard interface of a production component, the determination of required data to be exchanged depending on the interfacing partner (machine, product, “agents”, visualization, etc.) needs to be defined.