UberManufacturing
Simon Mayer, Dominic Plangger, Florian Michahelles, Simon Rothfuß · 2016
In this paper, we present the application of an automatic service composition system in the context of collaborative industrial manufacturing. We discuss how our system could support a production-as-a-service paradigm and present the architecture we created to realize this potential. The basis of our approach are embedded semantic descriptions of a production cell's available resources (machines and human workers). Using these descriptions and given a specification of the product to be manufactured, our system is able to derive a collaborative plan that composes its available resources to achieve that manufacturing goal. This ability to flexibly reconfigure industrial equipment in a goal-driven way is becoming increasingly important in the industrial domain, where mass customization leads to ever smaller lot sizes and potentially even to a lot-size-one world. It can revolutionize the way we think about manufacturing: instead of highly optimized integrated high-volume production lines, this would allow individual manufacturing cells to offer their capabilities as a service and compete with other cells in a paradigm that we refer to as UberManufacturing.