Evolution of cyber-physical production systems supported by community-enabled experiences

Abstract

Due to rapid changes in customer requirements, production systems constantly need to evolve. Together with the increasing penetration of internet, this everlasting evolution process is one of the main drivers to implement Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS). Therefore, this paper proposes to enhance evolution support besides the raw implementation of changes on the cyber level of CPPSs. Enhancements are done by using inherent experience of machines that are augmented by additional experience of similar machines at potentially remote locations. This contribution presents a CPPS structure and terminology for an evolution-aware capability based on evolution steps and shows the potential for using experience. In order to streamline evolution, the concept of a machine evolution community is presented that enables discovery and propagation of evolutionary steps in a CPPS with respect to different evolutionary use cases.