Towards a formal description and automatic execution of production processes

Abstract

Industry 4.0 enforces digital revolution in the manufacturing industry by introducing smart devices and knowledge bases to form intelligent manufacturing information systems. One of the goals of the digital revolution is to support an automatic production from product specification to allow faster reaction on the product changes and a lot size one production. In order to make this possible, a formal language to describe production processes is needed, together with a code generator for its models and an engine to execute the code on smart devices. In this paper we propose a research on Industry 4.0 manufacturing using a Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) approach to model production processes, use the models to generate instructions to smart devices and human workers, and gather a feedback from them during the process execution.