Cyber-Physical Production Systems to Monitor the Polishing Process of Cutlery Production

As technology evolves, the contemporary technological paradigm of manufacturing SME's has been changing and gaining traction to accommodate their evergrowing needs for adaptation to modern industrial processes and standards. Their willingness to integrate Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) modules in their manufacturing processes and to implement Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) is firmly based on the perception that value added services result from the technological evolution and, in the future, better tools are expected to guarantee process control, surveillance and maintenance. These Intelligent Systems involve transdisciplinary approaches to guarantee interaction and behavioral fluidity between hardware and software components which often leads to complexity in the coordination of these components and processes. The main objective of this work is to study these aspects and to contribute with data regarding the applicability of CPS components in the current SME's environment with the intent of improving the performance of their manufacturing processes. To accomplish this, an architecture is proposed, which is based in the process modelling and process simulation of the different stages of an existing SME factory production and allows real-time information, through IoT data collection, to feed different mechanisms of production improvement such as planning, scheduling and monitoring.