Towards Individualized Production with Flexible Shopfloor IT based on Distributed OPC UA Services

Nowadays, manufacturers face the problems to adjust their production according to the fast-changing global competition. Car manufacturers, for example, are in front of a new era of individual mobility. They need to switch from combustion engines to electric drives. In general, manufacturers have to develop production strategies to lower set up time and meet requirements faster. The classical production line is most effective if the product variety is low and the lot size is high but facing the rapid growing demand for individualized products and fast-changing requirements, manufacturers must discover new ways of manufacturing. One possibility is the flexible shopfloor. In this work, we will present our concept of a flexible shopfloor IT for controlling a robotic demonstrator. We use OPC UA over TSN as a platform for communication and CODESYS as SoftSPS for the control of sensors and actuators. In order to create valid data for ongoing discussions we use function point analysis and counting lines of sourcecode to measure software size. Our expectation is that the initial effort for implementing a flexible shopfloor IT is higher compared to the classic approach, but for all the following implementation it will take less time, because of the possibility of reuse already developed systems.