Smart Manufacturing Retrofit for Brownfield Systems

摘要

In recent years, the concept of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing have caused disruption and upheaval in many industries. These concepts promise high efficiency and flexibility but also require seamless communication and interoperability among machines. Brownfield systems, that do not satisfy these requirements, need a functional extension or enhancement in order to remain competitive. This paper proposes a solution for retrofitting a brownfield system on the example of an industrial robot. An architecture for a gateway device is presented, which enables a legacy robot to communicate within a smart manufacturing environment. A concrete implementation shows, that the presented approach can be used to upgrade machinery with comparatively little effort.