Design and Implementation of a Service-Oriented Architecture for the Optimization of Industrial Applications

A novel architecture for the field of industrial automation is described, the goals of which are: 1) computation of optimal production plans; 2) automated usage of the optimized plans; 3) flexibility and reusability at development and maintenance; and 4) seamless transition from current practice to the approach introduced herein. The architecture consists of three main components: 1) a set of OPC unified architecture (UA) servers, which are used to model the information from the device level; 2) a set of services organized into two layers (basic and complex services), which act as a link between the first and the third layer; and 3) a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) layer for the computation of production plans. Extensive performance tests motivate the choice of the service development framework, and prove the effectiveness of the special adapter software solution for the integration of current devices and the ability of the UA server to manage a high number of UA connections. As a proof-of-concept, the architecture has been tested for a real manufacturing problem composed of four flexible manufacturing systems. The results show that the architecture is able to efficiently control and monitor a real manufacturing process according to an optimized schedule with over 99% of the time spent on the manufacturing.