A Service-Based Production Ecosystem Architecture for Industrie 4.0

Changeability is one major goal of Industrie 4.0. Existing production architectures limit changeability, because programmable logic controllers (PLC) that are responsible for the execution of real-time production steps also define the order of production steps that are executed for every product. PLC programming therefore implicitly defines the production process. Consequently, any change of a production process requires changes in PLC code, causes potential side effects due to unknown controller dependencies, and requires extensive testing. We propose a service-based architecture approach that encapsulates production steps into re-useable services. Production cells invoke services, and comparable to multi-agent systems autonomously decide about optimal service invocations based on shared information. In this article, we outline our service-based architecture concept and describe a use-case that illustrates the decentral organization of production systems and the cooperative optimization of production steps.