Towards adaptive and efficient bottling plants in a cyber physical production system environment

The bottling procedure of filling media with strong foaming behavior is critical. Each of these media have different foaming characteristics depending on environmental factors. The usage of novel filling valves offers more possibilities to control the bottling process. Industrial providers of bottling plants developed a wide range of methods to suppress foaming as far as possible during the process. However, degasification and foam generation still appear and affect the speed of the bottling. Thus, a dual optimization problem arises. While the mathematical description of the dynamics of this valve and its drive are well known, a quantitative model of foaming and degasification is not available. As a result, manually adjusted process parameters are provided to the machine, which have to be pre-determined. In this paper, we focus on the development of concepts to gain adaptivity and increase efficiency through new approaches of controlling the filling process. Besides this new requirement, we have to ensure high accuracy and avoid incorrect bottling. Furthermore, a decentralized automation concept is presented, providing a basis to implement novel control algorithms, derived from other applications like robotic motion planning, in a cost- and energy-efficient, secure manner.