Achieving Flexible Digital Production with the Arrowhead Workflow Choreographer

Arrowhead is an IIoT (Industrial IoT) framework that dynamically and flexibly supports automated manufacturing processes following Industry 4.0 expectations. This technical paper describes how its workflow management system, i.e., the Workflow Choreographer supports automated production. The motivation behind this work is to make production workflow management and execution more flexible by applying the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) principles that help information exchange between various, loosely coupled systems through late binding and lookup of their services. This paper further details the functions of the Workflow Choreographer system and shows how it applies the identified workflow levels in practice to provide a solution for the given challenge. To validate its feasibility, the paper presents simple use cases where the Workflow Choreographer manages typical production processes under laboratory conditions.