A fault compensation algorithm for a distributed manufacturing system

Industrial production systems for smart factories or the so-called Industry 4.0 will demand high interoperability and connectivity between production modules, so that modules could be monitored in real-time. Production modules should make decisions on their own, with no human intervention, they must be modular and adaptable to changing circumstances and customers' requirements. The autonomous operation of production modules in smart factories imposes asynchronous delays due to several reasons. For instance, object recognition time, grasping time or welding delays that change due to a newly reoriented or positioned component. Consequently, production modules need to be speeded up to compensate for delays in previous production stages. In this paper, we present a novel Distributed Controller that autonomously compensate production delays. The proposed controller compensates for major production delays that affect the total production time of a product with the objective of maintaining the mean production time. Experiments are reported in this paper which show the feasibility of the algorithm working in a real manufacturing scenario.