Orchestration of an assembly line through an event-based middleware
Vu, Tuan (2023)
2023
Automaatiotekniikan DI-ohjelma - Master's Programme in Automation Engineering
Tekniikan ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2023-07-24
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202307117175
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202307117175
Tiivistelmä
Over the last few decades, automation systems have been continuously developed to suit the need of Industrial 4.0. Recently, there has been a trend in shifting to more decentralized or distributed industrial system designs, which increase the flexibility of the systems and interoperability between an increasingly diverse catalog of components developed for supporting automotive industrial systems. Nowadays, automation systems are mainly controlled by Programmable Logic Controllers, while they are efficient and reliable, these types of controllers normally require input/output devices to be directly connected to the controllers, which limits the flexibility and operability of the systems.
To find a way to solve the aforementioned problem, in this thesis, FIWARE context brokers and additional applications are proposed to be used as middlewares which facilitate the communication among the components, allowing the data to be exchanged as events between different data receiving or sending endpoints and in different data models while minimizing the need of reprogramming required to adapt controllers and controlled systems to various changes in the systems by using subscription services supported by the context brokers. Additionally, by utilizing service-oriented architecture (SOA) which is also used by the context brokers to distribute notifications, an application following event-driven architecture can be developed in order to orchestrate the operations of automotive systems instead of using Programmable Logic Controller-based orchestrators.
An application that simulates the operations of FASTory assembly line located in Factory Automation Systems and Technology Laboratory (FAST-lab) of Tampere University was used as a test bed where different control system designs utilizing different components and architectures were successfully tested to yield respective results which could be analyzed and compared with each other in order to evaluate the capability of the designs.
To find a way to solve the aforementioned problem, in this thesis, FIWARE context brokers and additional applications are proposed to be used as middlewares which facilitate the communication among the components, allowing the data to be exchanged as events between different data receiving or sending endpoints and in different data models while minimizing the need of reprogramming required to adapt controllers and controlled systems to various changes in the systems by using subscription services supported by the context brokers. Additionally, by utilizing service-oriented architecture (SOA) which is also used by the context brokers to distribute notifications, an application following event-driven architecture can be developed in order to orchestrate the operations of automotive systems instead of using Programmable Logic Controller-based orchestrators.
An application that simulates the operations of FASTory assembly line located in Factory Automation Systems and Technology Laboratory (FAST-lab) of Tampere University was used as a test bed where different control system designs utilizing different components and architectures were successfully tested to yield respective results which could be analyzed and compared with each other in order to evaluate the capability of the designs.