Improvement of Multistage Quality Control through the Integration of Decision Modeling and Cyber-Physical Production Systems

The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies allowed the development of new solutions to be applied at the shop-floor and all the tools which helps the manufacturers. Hence, new solutions such as cyber-physical production systems, data analytics and knowledge management were developed and proposed to solve the well-known issues, such as quality control in multistage manufacturing systems. However, those solutions can only have a small contribution in solving that issues compared to an optimized and fully integrated approach. To allow the development of a fully integrated environment, it is necessary to deliver a standard way to communicate and interact with the different functionalities. The proposed research aims to provide an integration layer, capable of translating the rules defined at the knowledge management level, structured as Decision Model and Notation rules, into an AutomationML based language. This allows the cyber-physical production system the ability to apply these rules near the shop-floor. This article presents the template defined to represent the rules in AutomationML as well as the infrastructure developed to receive the rules from the knowledge management, translate them and deliver to the cyber-physical production system. At the end of the article is presented a test bed where the solution is instantiated with rules focused on quality control.