Capability-based system-aware planning and scheduling of workflows for adaptable manufacturing systems

In times of fast changing markets and short product life-cycles, manufacturing systems have to be adaptable and support a variety of products and product volumes. Production has to be product-driven while considering customer requirements. This book presents an approach that aims at improving flexibility of IT-systems in production enabling quick adaptations of manufacturing systems based on the product. Through self-description and intelligent manufacturing resources, the system configurations can be detected automatically. This allows generating factory-specific executable action sequences that consider material flows and capabilities of available resources. The result is a process plan that is automatically adapted to customer-specific parameters as well as the current factory setup. No further manual reconfiguration of the software is necessary. Thus, changes can be introduced more easily and new products and resources can be integrated easily. By decoupling products from manufacturing systems, generic descriptions can be reused for different setups and adaptability is increased.