Project Overview:

Future manufacturing will require high flexibility/adaptability and speed with respect to organisation of production and supply-chain management and require an increasing amount of services and inter-company collaboration. These future requirements especially concern control and networking of embedded control systems of manufacturing enterprises at ERP (office), MES (factory control) and production level. Taking these requirements into account and building on top of the successful FP5 Project PABADIS, the PABADIS’PROMISE project extends the idea of distributed control to an innovative architecture which incorporates both resource and product. With the project’s new paradigm ”The Order is the Application” which stipulates a correspondingly innovative control and networking architecture across all three levels, PABADIS’PROMISE will combine European and international forces to provide this architecture allowing European companies to cope with the mentioned future needs.

As designated outcome the PABADIS’PROMISE project will develop a new control architecture based on distributed intelligence, a new manufacturing ontology, a first embedded Real-Time agent platform for control, a new generation of RFID’s, a new generation of field control devices, and building blocks for a new generation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems.
At ERP level new functions together with new interfaces will be developed, enabling direct access from ERP level to the field control system following the new PABADIS’PROMISE ontology, which provides a framework for product and production process description and comparison. 

Both Manufacturing Execution System (MES) level and Field Control level will be completely decentralised. Innovative to current practice and research, the MES level will be decentralised into Mobile Software Agents which are located (stored) in smart Tags which are attached directly to the product (Agent on RFID). Once the product arrives at a processing station, the Agent is read out of the RFID Tag and invoked to ensure product processing, further planning based on the ontology based descriptions, and further necessary transport steps. For this, a first Embedded Real-Time Agent Platform will be developed. 

To be flexible with regard to the logical usage of the plant’s machinery, the product dependent control part (for which a new manufacturing ontology will be developed) has to be provided individually for each product in the moment of production and is also located within the Mobile Software Agent, respectively in the RFID Tag. The Field Control level, correspondingly, is reduced to Residential Software Agents, which represent the physically possible production process. Only these fine grained control building blocks are permanently located on the resource control devices. They will behave as drivers for the physics of the resources similar to drivers for PC periphery systems like printers and modems.

Hence, the PABADIS’PROMISE project will provide basic architectures, methodologies and technologies for the long term innovation of manufacturing systems. By providing a new manufacturing control paradigm - and proofing it by a demonstrator – the project will have an economical impact both on Europe’s manufacturing industry by providing it with better means for production but also for Europe’s control equipment industry by providing new products and services. The main impact is expected for single piece production as given in automotive industry, aircraft industry, machining tool industry, electronics industry, and furniture industry. 

By these means it will be possible to reach the following benefits:

• Dynamic reconfiguration of assembly, production, and transport systems (integrate new machines, replace machines, or extract old machines) in a plug-and-participate way,
• Dynamic design of control applications on demand related to the intended products,
• High degree of control code flexibility which enables an all-round plant, only limited by its physical parameters,
• Integration of customer demands until their ultimate point of no return by physical/machine reasons, and 
• Cross company wide co-operation over the whole supply chain.

Project partners:
Otto-von-Guericke University, Germany
SAP AG, Germany
Siemens AG, Germany
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Identec Solutions AG, Austria
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Machining Centers Manufacturing S.p.A., Italy
CR Fiat, Business Information Technologies, Italy
ARMINES Ecole des Mines d’Ales, France
Defi Systemes, France
Industrial Systems Institute, Greece
ACE Advanced Concepts Enterprises S.A., Greece