Automatic generation of shop floor gateway configurations from systems modeling language

In the development of production systems, the engineering of Manufacturing Execution Systems poses a complex and time-consuming task. One of the specific tasks, which contribute to this fact, are the efforts necessary for the configuration of the shop floor gateway of an MES. In the past few years, a great number of promising approaches for the model-based systems engineering of production systems including MES have been proposed. This paper describes industrial research activities, which practically investigate the opportunities of using common MBSE approaches and applying necessary extensions for an automatic generation of shop floor MES gateway configurations. As a basis, systems engineering models for production systems, i.e., an extension to Systems Modeling Language, and standard model transformation mechanisms, i.e., MOF-Model-to- Text Transformation Language, are used. After an introduction to the investigated approach, this paper presents and demonstrates a possible tool chain, which is based on existing implementations of established standards, using a lab-scale application example.