Towards a Service-Oriented Architecture for Production Planning and Control: A Comprehensive Review and Novel Approach

The trends of shorter product lifecycles, customized products, and volatile market environments require manufacturers to reconfigure their production increasingly frequent to maintain competitiveness and customer satisfaction. More frequent reconfigurations, however, are linked to increased efforts in production planning and control (PPC). This poses a challenge for manufacturers, especially in regard of demographic change and shortage of qualified labour, since many tasks in PPC are performed manually by domain experts. Following the paradigm of software-defined manufacturing, this paper targets to enable a higher degree of automation and interoperability in PPC by applying the concepts of service-oriented architecture. As a result, production planners are empowered to orchestrate tasks in PPC without consideration of underlying implementation details. At first, it is investigated how tasks in PPC can be represented as services with the aim of encapsulation and reusability. Secondly, a software architecture based on asset administration shells is presented that allows connection to production data sources and enables integration and usage of such PPC services. ... mehrIn this sense, an approach for mapping asset administrations shells to OpenAPI Specifications is proposed for interoperable and semantic integration of existing services and legacy systems. Lastly, challenges and potential solutions for data integration are discussed considering the present heterogeneity of data sources in manufacturing.