Abstract
Industry 4.0 involves the digital transformation of the industry with the integration and digitization of all industrial processes that make up the value chain, which is characterized by adaptability, flexibility, and efficiency to meet the needs of customers in today’s market. Therefore, the adaptations of the new bioprocess industry require a lot of flexibility to react quickly and constantly to market changes and to be able to offer more specialized, customized products with high operational efficiency. This paper presents a flexible, scalable, and robust framework based on software components, container technology, microservice concepts, and the publish/subscribe paradigm. This framework allows new components to be added or removed online, without the need for system reconfiguration, while maintaining temporal and functional constraints in industrial automation systems. The main objective of the framework proposed is the use of components based on microservices, allowing easy implementation, scalability, and fast maintenance, without losing or degrading the robustness from previous developments. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed framework was verified in two case studies (1) a soursop soda making process is presented, with a fuzzy controller implemented to keep the pasteurizer output flow constant (UHT) and (2) an automatic storage tank selection and filling process with actuated valves to direct the fluid to the corresponding tank at the time to start the process. The results showed that the platform provided a high-fidelity design, analysis, and testing environment for the flow of cyber information and its effect on the physical operation in a beverage processing plant with high demand for flexibility, scalability, and robustness of its processes, as they were experimentally verified in a real production process.
Highlights
The growing development in the bioprocess industry and the need to meet the new challenges of Industry 4.0 require constant adaptation to new trends
We mainly focused on microservice concepts, container technology, and publish/subscribe pattern based on data distribution services (DDS) middleware technology
Some results are presented for the production of soursop juice, including the flow control in the ultra-high temperature (UHT) to maintain the pasteurization conditions while the product is sent to the tanks and automatic tank filling system, the automatic selection of tank availability, actuated valves to direct the fluid to the corresponding tank, and time to start the process
Summary
The growing development in the bioprocess industry and the need to meet the new challenges of Industry 4.0 require constant adaptation to new trends. Because of the need for real-time control capabilities, automation in the bioprocess industry demands great flexibility from an ICPS to achieve optimum operating points that integrate the entire process value chain This requires that the exchange of information, with its requirements and different technologies, can be done from any level of the process automation pyramid. The above presents challenges related to the addition of new functionalities to the processes and the interoperability between them To solve this problem, traditional techniques usually solve it with the incorporation of new components, which implies the inclusion of new hardware, generating a higher level of implementation costs, reconfigurations, and additional support, as well as a higher level of complexity due to the difficulties of interacting with hardware from different manufacturers. The validation, results, and discussions of the implementation at the juice production plant are presented in Section 5, and Section 6 concludes this work
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