Development of a Reference Architecture for Benchmarking Service of Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The paper reports the main research activities currently carried out within the Benchmarking Service project. The project aims to develop a web-based arena, where production systems can be quickly and exhaustively described and different production scheduling policies can be evaluated and compared under a common simulation environment. Within such a context, industrial practitioners, looking for production scheduling solutions for their selected industrial plants, will be able to evaluate alternative scheduling approaches without any real risks.The creation of the virtual arena needs at first the formal definition of a standard framework for describing a generic production system, making a sound distinction between the shop-floor layer and the control layer.After a first section dedicated to the objectives and target users addressed by the whole project, the paper provides an overview of the current research efforts in establishing a formal standard description of a production system. Further sections are devoted to the definition of the descriptive framework and to the illustration of the first release of the Test-bench Assistant