Engineering an ADACOR based solution into a small-scale production system

On the verge of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), companies will need, sooner or later, to adapt their systems in order to follow the emergent visions of Industrie 4.0 and Industrial Internet demanding the digitalization of their processes, preventing the losing of their competiveness levels. The engineering of such innovative manufacturing control systems assumes a crucial challenge without which becomes hard to convince researchers and, primarily, practitioners of the proposed architecture potentials. This paper describes the engineering aspects of deploying an ADACOR (ADAptive holonic COntrol aRchitecture for distributed manufacturing systems) based CPS for a real small-scale production system. Since the solution is using agent technology, a special attention is devoted to the interface from the agent control layer to the physical resources using the industrially adopted OPC-UA (OPC Unified Architecture). At the end, some lessons learned in engineering this CPS are drawn.