STRATEgic GUide to Smart manufacturing

Production manufacturing has drastically changed in the last decade; year after year, it has become more complex and tightly integrated with new technologies. Applying new technologies can be safely and adequately done during the initial design phases of a new production plant. However, one of the critical challenges of this so-called “fourth industrial revolution” is that it must be applied to existing production plants, introducing much more complexity. The goal of STRATEGUS (STRATEgic GUide to Smart manufacturing) is to provide understandable techniques and software architecture for guiding industrials toward properly integrating new technologies in their current production plant.

STRATEGUS will build the so-called digital twin, a digital representation of the factory plant that functions as an interface to the sensor data and contains mathematical models of the equipment. The digital twin provides a structured view of sensor data, allowing one to perform timing analysis, make future predictions, and adjust the control strategy. Then, the central orchestrator will be the Strategist. This meta-scheduler has a twofold purpose: 1. estimating the timing behavior of the events inside the physical plant by harnessing the power of the digital twin, and 2. optimizing the activities on the line based on order arrival and reacting to unexpected events and accidents. STRATEGUS takes inspiration for describing the models inside the twin from the theory of multimode systems, where each piece of equipment is modeled as a set of differential or difference equations describing how they manipulate the products’ characteristics until it reaches the state of the finished product.