RESPOND

Contact: Jonas Hansert B.Sc.

The research project RESPOND (Resilient Sociotechnical Processes in the Industrial Internet of Things) is concerned with the question of how intelligent factories can be developed that autonomously detect faults and initiate corrective measures themselves. The results are intended to contribute to how manufacturing can become even more autonomous, flexible and dynamic. The aim is to manufacture individual products automatically and reliably.

Making systems more flexible

The solution orchestrates IIoT nodes such as machines, sensors and edge devices, and also integrates people with different roles into the cyber-physical production system (CPPS). Flexibility is achieved, among other things, by extending existing methods and tools for modeling and executing processes so that IIoT-enabled devices can be used as generalized process resources with capabilities and self-description independent of the specific use case. The system can thus respond resiliently at runtime to changes, uncertainties, and errors in the spatial, temporal, and interaction context.

Context modeling and adaptive process execution in IIOT

Context modeling of the entire IIoT ecosystem is a core work and foundation for adaptive process execution in the Internet of Things. The context model is used by the IIoT process modeling language also developed in the project and can be used for process descriptions using the emerging toolchain. Self-monitoring as well as self-healing components (Self-X) use these semantic descriptions to ensure resilient execution of the processes even under changing contexts. Process generation and control is handled by the IIoT workflow management system, which is designed to meet the special requirements of self-healing systems.

The processes and technologies developed serve to strengthen the coupling of production systems and IT with IoT, as well as the infrastructure required for this in the production environment. Through the solutions developed in the project, more reliable and at the same time more flexible production systems of the future can be developed and operated, and technologies can be transferred to further IoT/CPS domains.

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