A OPC UA Based Execution Engine for Production Control in Decentral Organized Manufacturing

In cyber-physical production systems, the capabilities and states of field resources are continuously available. For adaptive and flexible production control, this information must be evaluated during process execution, which is often not done due to a static job shop schedule. With the presented Execution Engine, we demonstrate a system architecture for order-oriented, fully automated execution of production orders. For the representation of field resources and the interface to the production process control, the OPC UA standard is utilized. Based on an enriched description of the order production steps, an execution considering the states of individual field components is realized. The increased communication overhead is addressed by an OPC UA Aggregation Device Registry, which enables efficient pre-selection of field resources during runtime allocation.