Universal identification and control of industrial manufacturing equipment as a service

Rapid prototyping as well as retrofitting and digitization of legacy manufacturing equipment often needs design and application of closed loop controllers. The analysis and modeling for such systems like energy-conversion or material transport devices is labor-intensive and needs process understanding. This paper presents a universal approach of identification and closed loop control of arbitrary linear systems delivered through web services using OPC UA as a standardized industrial communication interface. The identification service was used to model the dynamics of a 6-DOF industrial robot and a laboratory-scale water plant containing two separately controllable pumps. The control service successfully controlled the robot’s linearizable axes and the water plant’s pumps by using their respective identified state-space models. To evaluate the performance of the controllers in terms of stability, accuracy, and time response, target trajectories and disturbances like signal noise and latency in communication were introduced. Simulation and laboratory experiments show promising results for control of diverse systems with varying time-constants and imply broad applicability. So, this paper brings a guideline to efficiently implement model predictive control in manufacturing.