Towards a Flexible Smart Factory with a Dynamic Resource Orchestration

Amid the current industrial revolution, a total disruption of the existing production lines may seem to be the easiest approach, as the potential possibilities seem limitless when starting from the ground up. On the business side, an adaptation of existing production lines is always a preferred option. In support of adaptation as opposed to disruption, this paper presents a new approach of using production process orchestration in a smart factory, discussed in an industrial case-study example. A proposed smart factory has the Orchestrator component in its core, responsible for complete semantical orchestration of production processes on one hand, and various factory resources on the other hand, in order to produce the desired product. The Orchestrator is a complex, modular, highly scalable, and pluggable software product responsible for automatised planning, scheduling, and execution of the complete production process. According to their offered capabilities, non-smart and smart resources—machines, robots, humans—are simultaneously and dynamically assigned to execute their dedicated production steps.