Proactive Control of Production Systems Using Proposed Data Integration Strategies

Developments in the production sector during recent years have led to rapid growth in usage of automated systems when it comes to communication and data exchange. Such systems help businesses with acquiring new customers, while also providing means to react to sudden changes in product demand and competition with the rest of the market. These circumstances put pressure on small to medium businesses to implement expensive systems into their production infrastructure without proper integration with the rest of the available hardware or software. Installing such systems often leads to further expenses in operator education and training. This paper touches upon the problems faced by these businesses, which if left neglected, could in certain extreme cases lead to unrecoverable financial losses. The proposed solutions help with lightening the pressure by incorporating fully automated integration strategies. Using various experiments, the applicability of these strategies has been verified using the Witness Horizon simulator which incorporates a Digital Twin of the AFB Festo production line.