Emulation of manufacturing equipment through the dynamic generation of graphic and interactive environments

The work presented in this paper is part of an Industry 4.0—Factories of the Future project, which explores the use of intelligent multi-agent architectures to control flexible manufacturing units. The concept of flexibility results from the ability to adapt manufacturing processes in an agile way to context variations, whether these result from changes in the references under production, the priority and quantity of orders, limitations to or unavailability of equipment, or a lack of components. Studying control solutions for such diverse environments and with such different contexts is a complex task, particularly with regard to validating and evaluating the control solutions. Mass application in a real context is impractical, at least in the initial stages, so the only option is to resort to simulation, which is perfectly suitable for scientific validation but not flexible and practical enough to be used as proofs of a more practical nature or for demonstrations. It is in this context that the work presented here was developed. The result is a framework that is used to generate virtual manufacturing equipment. Assuming that the behavior of the equipment is described according to a code routine, this framework allows for annotating the state, input, and output variables, and based on this, it generates a virtual version of the equipment with a graphical and interactive interface that can be interconnected with other virtual and real equipment. In this way, it is possible to replicate a manufacturing unit with real and virtual equipment and test the practical behavior of the control solutions, allowing us to interact with the equipment (for example, turning off the equipment, injecting faults, conditioning the production rate, etc.) and, thus, pragmatically and visually assess the behavior of the entire solution.