STRATEGUS

Production manufacturing has drastically changed in the last decade, year after year, it became more complex and tightly integrated with new technologies. The application of new technologies can be safely and properly done during the initial design phases of a new production plant. However, one of the key challenges of this so-called “fourth industrial revolution” is that it must be applied to existing production plants, introducing much more complexity. The goal of STRATEGUS (STRATEgic GUide to Smart manufacturing) is to provide understandable techniques and software architecture for guiding industrials towards the proper integration of new technologies in their current production plant.

STRATEGUS will build the so-called digital twin, a digital representation of the factory plant, that functions as an interface to the sensor data and contains mathematical models of the equipment. The digital twin provides a structured view of sensor data, allowing one to perform timing analysis, make future predictions, and adjust the control strategy. Then, the main orchestrator will be Strategist, a meta-scheduler that has a twofold purpose: 1. estimating the timing behaviour of the events inside the physical plant by harnessing the power of the digital twin, and 2. optimising the activities on the line based on order arrival and reacting to unexpected events and accidents. STRATEGUS takes inspiration for describing the models inside the twin from the theory of multimode systems, where each piece of equipment is modelled as a set of differential or difference equations describing how they manipulate the products’ characteristics until it reaches the state of the finished product.