Industry 4.0 Integration Assessment and Evolution at EVVA GmbH: Process-Driven Automation Through centurio.work

(a) Situation faced: The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the manufacturing domain has led to new concepts of how things like machines can interact. In contrast to explicit connections among machines, computing resources, and UIs (humans)—that is, semi-hard-coded connections of components through a service bus—providing a context for how things are connected can foster maintainability and comprehension and advance the notion of a loosely coupled system. (b) Action taken: This chapter presents a four-step integration approach that equips small and medium-sized companies with a defined evolution toward flexible and reliable digitalization and automation using the BPM technology centurio.work. A process-based framework, centurio.work uses BPMN notation to orchestrate and control manufacturing use cases. The four-step integration approach presented here is demonstrated on a real-world scenario at EVVA that realizes the interactions among a lathe, a robot, and a loading station, which is a common scenario for the manufacturing industry. (c) Results achieved: We deployed process models from a testbed, the pilot factory of the Technical University of Vienna (TU), to the production cell of EVVA. Because of the similarity of the equipment—the pilot factory and EVVA have a lathe and a robot—nearly all of the pilot factory’s existing templates could be reused, but this approach increased the start-up time for orchestrating the production cell. However, interfaces for each component of the cell were defined and implemented in such a way that the components can be orchestrated, and the stepwise integration approach facilitated parallel development of the functionality with no interruption in production. (d) Lessons learned: The most complex step was defining the interface for orchestrating the equipment, especially realizing stateless interfaces with atomic methods that allow safe use in modeling environments. The manufacturing domain has several standards that address the same topic, so no general design rules are available. On the modeling side, we had to improve only the processes that are responsible for tasks on the machine level, that is, changing a variable that represents the current state. The top-level processes were kept the same.