Driven by market demands for increased flexibility and agility in production systems and factories, new concepts and technologies are being developed in the context of Industry 4.0. One possibility is smart factories. These use digital twins supported by IoT technology to manage and control production. Building on this idea, the smart factory consists of intelligent and networked production modules that, together with the digital twin, represent the next stage of flexible production systems.
As part of the master's thesis, we developed a concept for the modular construction of smart factories, focusing on the characteristics of each module. We defined what each module needs, how and with whom it communicates to exchange data and commands, and where the main processing and response of the module itself takes place in real time.
Part of the task was to physically build the production module. In it, we used actuators, sensors and small computers for physical fabrication. These were interconnected, a control and operation framework were developed within a Python programming language, and then everything was connected to the IoT and control platform via a communication protocol. The platform is the main software for connecting and controlling the smart manufacturing modules in our smart factory.
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