A Complex Event Processing System for Monitoring of Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Future manufacturing systems will require to process large amounts of complex data due to a rising demand on visibility and vertical integration of factory floor devices with higher level systems. Systems contained in higher layers of the business model are rapidly moving towards a Service Oriented Architecture, inducing a tendency to push Web Technologies down to the factory floor level. Evidence of this trend is the addition of Web Services at the device level with Device Profile for Web Services and the transition of OPC based on COM/DCOM communication to OPC-UA based on Web Services. DPWS and OPC-UA are becoming nowadays the preferred options to provide on a device level, service-oriented solutions capable to extend with an Event Driven Architecture into manufacturing systems. This thesis provides an implementation of a factory shop floor monitor based on Complex Event Processing for event-driven manufacturing processes. Factory shop monitors are particularly used to inform the workshop personnel via alarms, notifications and, visual aids about the performance and status of a manufacturing process. This work abstracts the informative value of the event-cloud surrounding the factory shop floor by processing its content against rules and formulas to convert it to valuable pieces of information that can be exposed to business monitors and dashboards. As a result, a system with a generic framework for integrating heterogeneous sources was reached, transforming simple data into alarms and complex events containing a specific context within the manufacturing process.