Device adapter concept towards enabling plug-and-produce production environments

Modern manufacturing systems require a transformation from mass production towards mass customization. This results in a trend towards more agile production lines. This demands reduction of configuration times when building the production line as well as faster reconfiguration when adding new hardware and product variants to the manufacturing line. This paper introduces the concept of a device adapter that allows the device to be seamlessly plugged into the agile production systems. The device adapter wraps the device functionality and offers it as a service, hiding away the low-level process capability (skill) implementation and allowing to formally represent the production steps. Preliminary tests have been performed on an industrial demonstrator that simulates real manufacturing process.