Task Description Documents - An Interface Standard For Factory Automation

This work will present a novel interface standard for factory automation which allows for task driven manufacturing. The approach, developed in the course of the European project XPRESS, will describe manufacturing tasks without the need of traditional recipe values. As result, the same task description could be understood by multiple machine types which increases flexibility and scalability of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). Product properties are expressed directly inside the task description allowing to faster introducing new product variants. In order to achieve such novel information flow, the XPRESS approach builds on a flexible XML based "Task Description Documents". Each Task Description Document comprises of a set of well-defined top-level sections, which allow for describing important product and process properties in a standardized way. This makes important properties available for generalized systems, such as Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and workflow guided Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES).