Instant service choreographies for reconfigurable manufacturing systems - A demonstrator

The modularization and reuse of source code controlling traditional manufacturing systems is hindered by a tight coupling of these systems with their environment. Increasing uncertainty about production volume and demand fluctuations mandate new approaches, such as reconfigurable manufacturing systems, to address these issues. One key component for adaptable manufacturing systems is software reconfiguration. This paper shows how service oriented principles, along with schedule based service choreographies, can be applied in practice to achieve a flexible and reconfigurable software architecture that provides deterministic real-time guarantees which are required in many areas of automation. In addition to an abstract description of this approach, we implemented a real-world demonstrator and show how it can be reconfigured nearly instantly with a graphical user interface that triggers a heuristics based choreography and planning process.