A Practical Approach of Teaching Digitalization and Safety Strategies in Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Abstract

Digitalization strategies in cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) are one of the key factors of Industry 4.0. The topic not only addresses data preparation, real-time data processing, big data analytics, visualization and machine interface design but also cyber security and safety. Especially, unauthorized access to protected (personal or enterprise) data or unauthorized control of production facilities imply risks when it comes to digitalization. Because of the increased complexity of state-of-the-art technologies, educational institutions need to provide practice-oriented teaching methods in learning factories to help engineers of today understand the impact of those developments. In the light of this fact, this paper presents a practical approach of teaching digitalization strategies in CPPS. Planning, implementing and impacts of digitalization strategies are taught on a use-case with human-robot-collaboration. The objective of the use-case is to realize a real-time obstacle avoidance approach for a collaborative application based on a local positioning system. Here, students not only learn how to model the kinematics of a robot and program a robot but also how to design machine interfaces for real-time data transfer and processing as well as impacts of digitalization on safety and security. The implementation of the use-case is part of the TU Wien teaching portfolio and thus part of its learning factory, where students and apprentices have the possibility to experiment and gain experiences by deliberate error simulations.