Automatic parameterization of automation software for plug-and-produce

Cyber-Physical Production Systems' (CPPSs) main feature is adaptability, i.e. they can adapt quickly to new production goals such as new products or product variants. Today, the bottleneck of such approaches is the automation system, which still requires high manual engineering efforts for every adaptation step. Many recent solutions for a more adaptable automation software have focused on the automatic orchestration of software systems: for a new product and production configuration, a software solutions is created by putting together reusable software components. But such solutions come with a price: reusable software components must be, by definition, applicable to wide range of configurations. For this, software components come with free parameters that must be set according to the current configuration. Typically, the main problem is not the orchestration of software components but their correct parameterization. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, a solution to the parameterization problem of adaptable, CPPS-enable software systems. Due to the nature of CPPSs, no direct computation of parameters is possible. Instead, an iteration-based approach using a model of both the plant and the automation system is needed. An example from process industry illustrates the ideas.