Agile Factory - An Example of an Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Process

Since the late 90s the idea of mass customization in industry is present. The main goal is to handle the consumer demand for customized products. Recent developments in research, engineering and technology enable industries to move from profitable linear assembly lines to profitable nonlinear, dynamic assembly lines to satisfy such a demand. Industry 4.0, a German governmental initiative, encourages industries to use interconnected Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) to create context-sensitive and decentralized factory environments. CPSs in combination with tracking technologies and a component based assembly line can create a factory environment that allows customers to change their requirements during assemblytime. Such change is typically not considered in the domain of manufacturing. In modern software engineering projects, agile techniques allow customer change during the entire development phase. Such change results in customer oriented, customized software products. In this paper we describe the development of an Agile Factory prototype. The developed Agile Factory prototype transfers agile software engineering techniques to the domain of manufacturing. It explores the impact and feasibility of customer changes during assembly-time using a commercially available software framework. The assembly line of the Agile Factory is component based, using trackable mobile worktables in combination with stationary workstations. Therefore, each product with its associated request is trackable during assembly-time which enables us to implement a customer feedback loop. The feedback loop allows change requests during assembly-time. Without the integration of such tracking techniques a customer feedback loop is very difficult up to impossible to implement. We created a Cyber-Physical Human System (CPHS) using smart factory-hardware in combination with an accepted manufacturing software framework. We bridge the virtual and physical world enabling the customer and the factory worker to communicate with actual physical objects.