Development a modular factory with modular software components

Recent market trends require extremely short product life cycles to cope with individual customer requirements. The key technology to deal with these requirements is plug-and-produce, which reduces engineering time to change the production lines rapidly. This challenge is solved by the concept of a modular factory which allows to reconfigure individual machine stations without the need of extensive engineering effort. Current solutions focus on hardware approaches such as modular frames, cables and sensors. However software is still a barrier where the change of production line needs the reprogramming of individual devices. To deal with this challenge, the authors utilize the BEinCPPS architecture, which is built from open-source software components. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.