Towards a Common Manufacturing Service Bus to Enable Flexible Plug-and-Produce Automation

This paper aims to contribute to the wide adoption of emerging CPS technology, designed to increase the flexibility of current assembly lines, by incorporating real plug-and-produce capabilities and enabling skill based process execution. The solution herein proposed presents a middleware to allow fast registration and seamless communication between different automation systems and components, that is a manufacturing service bus, or MSB. This service bus integrates well known standards, such as OPC-UA and AutomationML to leverage compliance with current and future Industry 4.0 initiatives. In small lot production systems, results show that the overhead introduced by this additional stack, during production phase, is minimal when compared with the potential gain in terms of time and cost reduction during installation and ramp-up phases.