Smart Manufacturing
SmartFactory-KL brings research and industrial companies together in order to implement demonstrators in accordance with Industry 4.0-compliant standards and to test new technologies. The demonstrators are manufacturer-independent to avoid vendor lock-in problems and highly flexible. The newest demonstrator (Production Level 4) is designed to be highly autonomous. With “lot size one” production, it assembles user-customized USB pen drives using different autonomous and interoperable modules, each dedicated for a single step of the production. Modules are independent and controlled by themselves in case it is their turn to continue the production. The software architecture of the overall infrastructure maintains how the product is produced, by generating a recipe for manufacturing, scheduling the products by their priorities, production time, etc. The software architecture is designed with a service-oriented approach, which enables decoupling and an easier conversion into FaaS approach in PHYSICS project.
Our first use case in PHYSICS is “Auto deployment of substitute services”. The main goal of the use case is to increase productivity by improving the reliability and decreasing unplanned downtime of the production. The second use case is “High Confidence Quality Control”. The main goal of this use case is to improve the quality assurance for high quality product. This is achieved by using more complex quality assurance function available in the PHYSICS Platform, if the first quality check results are below the certainty threshold.
| Utilised RAMP Artefacts |
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| OW Skeleton Interface for Node-RED flows as functions |
| Request Aggregator |
| Branch Join |
Benefits
Transforming our quality assurance service into a function for use in PHYSICS (FaaS) enables it to be more reliable than before due to its serverless nature. In addition, PHYSICS ensures that the infrastructure is used more efficiently, thus, providing a cost effective (cost-reducing) solution. Moreover, with the design environment (DE), we have shortened the development time. Although the scalability is not one of main focuses of our use case in the short-term, PHYSICS allows scalability out-of-the-box for possible extensions in the future.