Basic requirements for Plug-and-Produce of 14.0 fluid power systems

The advancing digitalization has found its way into the manufacturing industry. Due to the increasing networking of machines and the virtualization of data and functionalities, flexible production systems, so-called cyber-physical production systems, are emerging. The resulting virtual representation of the systems increases the transparency of processes and makes it possible to integrate further analyses and optimizations, thus releasing additional technical and economic potential. During last years several concepts have been developing in order to increase the productivity of production machines and their built-in components. An important use-case to increase the availability of machines is the automated integration of components into a system, so called Plug-and-Produce. In this paper an approach to automate the commissioning of a fluid power machine based on the concepts of Industry 4.0 Systems is presented. After introducing the use-case scenario of the electro-hydraulic actuator, key elements for the automated integration process, the virtual representation and the plug-and-produce module are presented. The virtual representation of a component provides important information and services to support the automated commissioning. The plug-and-produce module collects and processes the information of all individual components to derive a valid commissioning procedure for the whole system. Finally, a draft of the entire plug-and-produce process of an electro hydraulic actuator is presented, providing a general understanding of cyber-physical fluid power systems.