Towards Round-trip Engineering to evolve Complex Production Systems by utilizing AutomationML

Abstract

Additive manufacturing and product configurations will become increasingly important in future production systems. This trend brings great opportunities for manufacturing companies, but also inherits challenges to overcome. Resulting from this, a heterogeneous tool-landscape has emerged, where each of the single tools is addressing a particular aspect of the value-creation network. An example for such a tool specifically targeting the engineering of such flexible production systems according to the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) has been proposed with the RAMI Toolbox. However, as universal frameworks are too general to deal with all aspects of developing such complex systems, other possibilities for conflictfree engineering of the system need to be available. Thus, the main contribution of this paper deals with proposing a Round-trip Engineering (RTE) approach, that allows to export previously modeled flexible production systems according to the peculiarities of RAMI 4.0 and subsequently reload external elaborated results. Thereby, a major benefit is the application of Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE), which ensures the traceability to the remaining system components. The chosen methodology for bidirectionally exchanging the engineering data is AutomationML, which allows to store exported information from RAMI 4.0 or import such stored information into it. The RTE-approach is thereby evaluated with a real-world case study, the Siemens Fischertechnik industrial plant model.