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www.us-tech.com
October, 2021
Orchestrating Automation Across the Shop Floor
By Joao Santos, Equipment and IoT Product Manager, Critical Manufacturing A
n automated factory-level workflow engine can orchestrate different “play- ers” on the production floor, including
guided transport systems, robots, operators, machines, or even drones. It is an important step towards high automation and, ultimate- ly, a “lights out” factory. To achieve high automation, a sys-
tem is required to work at a high level, knowing what to do and orchestrating resources accordingly. It must build a bridge between different entities to enable them to communicate. However, it does not need to enforce
processing or business rules, which is achieved using the manufacturing exe- cution system (MES) but must allow companies to progress automation all the way up to removing the need for any manual intervention.
Communication Of course, for a system to orchestrate
operations throughout the shopfloor, it needs to communicate with a wide vari- ety of systems across differing age, protocols and languages. For Critical Manufacturing, its factory automation workflow engine uses its Connect IoT module, which seamlessly and easily integrates new and legacy equipment and devices to create a distributed, decentral-
Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) can be used to optimize material workflows on the factory floor.
opment of a higher-level automation can develop at a pace that suits a wider strategy for growth. A solution that works cross-plat- form and cross-architecture inevitably needs to have a low hardware footprint with mini- mum memory, hard disk and computing
ized architecture on which to build an autonomous production network using a drag- and-drop logic interface. This forward-looking technology pro-
vides a pathway to an increasingly smart production environment and ensures devel-
power required to run, so it can be rendered in edge devices and executed on everything from a Raspberry Pi to the cloud.
Starting Small
To enable the coordination of different systems and applications, a factory- level workflow engine needs to trigger workflows based on events, creating, executing and monitoring jobs throughout the shop floor. Although a pilot project may ini-
tially be conceived for a specific process or application, the system needs to offer the extensibility and flexibility required to cover and regis- ter all factory events on a single plat- form. The interactions between differ- ent resources on a shop floor can be extremely complex. Although moving a material from A to B may seem straightforward, what happens if there is an obstacle, or the right material is not where it should be, or an automated guided vehicle (AGV) is
not available to carry out the operation? Should you buffer, send an alert, or stop
the machine? If working with a recipe man- agement system, what validation points need to be added?
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