An Interface-Oriented Resource Capability Model to Support Reconfiguration of Manufacturing Systems

Global trends in manufacturing force companies to deal with a production environment with increasing dynamics. In such an environment, companies have to cope with frequent changes of production requirements and conditions. In order to cope with these frequent changes, manufacturing machines have been designed to be reconfigurable. Although machines of this type have the potential to deal with a dynamic production environment, their full potential cannot be exploited, yet. One crucial reason for this is the long reaction time for the identification and design of a required system configuration. A first step towards problem solving is to have a capability model of manufacturing resources. Based on such a capability model, the manufacturability of production requests could be quickly analyzed. In addition, these models can be utilized to generate new configurations, which match changed requirements. However, state of the art approaches have several drawbacks regarding the efficient analysis of manufacturability and feasible resource reconfigurations. Accordingly, this contribution presents an interface-oriented approach for the modeling of manufacturing resource capabilities. The approach aims at the facilitation of the manufacturability check and reconfiguration analysis. Furthermore, the implementation of the modeling concept in AutomationML is presented, which allows a machine-interpretable representation of the model in a neutral data format. The applicability of the approach is illustrated by an example of an automated riveting system at Airbus and a discussion regarding the advantages and drawbacks of the developed approach is given.