Towards formal monitoring of workpieces in agile manufacturing

Abstract

Information about the locations of objects is one of the main ingredients of Industry 4.0. With the increased use of flexible and agile manufacturing techniques, the monitoring of workpieces in a factory can become more challenging. In this paper, we present a state-machine-based approach for monitoring workpieces using sensors such as RFID readers. We present a solution where each object is represented as a deterministic state machine to monitor the object's journey throughout production via this state machine representation. Multiple objects can be monitored at the same time by running parallel event-based state machines. We present an implementation of our solution using RFID-Readers and OPC UA.