Cloud-based Plug and Work architecture of the IIC Testbed Smart Factory Web

The Smart Factory Web (SFW) is a platform that connects Smart Factories over a network to enable flexible sharing and management of resources, assets and inventory to maximize production and efficiency. In order to become part of the Smart Factory Web, network participants describe not only their products, but also the factory capabilities to order to improve factory-to-factory collaboration. A Smart Factory Web Portal (SFWP) enables secure data and service integration in cross-site application scenarios as well as `plug & work' functions for devices, machines, and data analytics software by applying industrial standards, Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA), and Automation Markup Language (AutomationML or AML for short). OPC UA serves as a comprehensive and secure communication protocol from the machine level into the cloud. A Cloud Coupler on the shop floor publishes the availability of a factory and selected process data in the SFWP. Customers or even smart machines can use this information to make decisions for placing an order and track their orders in real time. In order to simplify the setup of the connection to the cloud and minimize the commissioning time the cloud coupler also aggregates all OPC UA servers on devices in the factory into a single OPC UA aggregated server address space. In this paper an architecture is proposed which uses cloud coupler and plug and work techniques to make a new or retrofit factory available in a SFW to share capability information towards a new marketplace for manufacturing. It is shown that the integration efforts are decreased but also the use of standards reduces the effort to define interfaces.