Intelligent workpiece carrier for distributed data collection and control in manufacturing environments

The growing demand for customized products is challenging companies to change their organizational structure towards a flexible organizational model. However, small and medium sized enterprises (SME) do not have the necessary resources to integrate in their production processes new technologies which could help them facing such challenges. We propose a framework in which an intelligent workpiece carrier (IWC) is introduced in a traditional production line. We propose to integrate the knowledge of production steps in the IWC to make it able to take decisions about the process execution. A first prototype was developed and tested to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Through the implementation, it has been shown that the IWC represents a promising component in the realization of flexible production systems.