Cloud-managed Service Deployment for Manual Assembly Workstations

Deployment and management of software and services in manufacturing environments is usually still a manual process that is performed during commissioning or reconfiguration. Customer-specific adjustments and reconfiguration due to changed requirements are time- and money-consuming. This is also a problem for workstations in manual assembly processes. In order to meet the requirements in terms of flexibility, such workstations are transforming more and more into cyber-physical systems with software as an increasingly important part. With cloud-based service management, functionalities of manual assembly workstations can be easily adapted and extended. It enables a significantly higher flexibility while saving effort and costs at the same time. This paper presents an approach how to manage and deploy functionalities of manual assembly workstations as services running directly on the workstations. The management of the workstations and the addition of new services is done from a cloud platform. The approach was implemented prototypically and tested in a use case for assembly of tractor gearboxes.