An Industry 4.0 Asset-Based Coordination Artifact for Production Systems Engineering

In Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS) engineering, domain experts design assets like products, production processes, and resources. However, the representation of dependencies between assets in heterogeneous engineering artifacts, like system plans, models, and tool data, is insufficient to coordinate engineering activities, like changes to shared asset properties, as it increases the risk of unplanned rework and project delay. While Industry 4.0 (I4.0) assets, defined in RAMI 4.0, allow representing multi-disciplinary views on assets, it remains open how to leverage this capability to coordinate changes in CPPS engineering. In this paper, we introduce the Product-Process-Resource Asset Network (PAN) coordination artifact, a knowledge graph based on I4.0 assets. We argue that the PAN coordination artifact fosters an explicit representation of change dependencies and engineering knowledge, improving capabilities for coordinating changes efficiently. In a feasibility study, we investigate the coordination capabilities of a PAN that represents change dependencies on a typical robot work cell in automotive manufacturing. Results show that the PAN provides effective capabilities for identifying risky assets for re-validation after changes.