Flexible Manufacturing using Semantically Interoperable Data Integration

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Every manufacturing enterprise and, in turn, its manufacturing systems, strive to produce at lowest possible cost, to perpetually enhance product quality, and to be able to rapidly respond to changing market demand. Existing manufacturing systems are not designed to meet the required market responsiveness neither at acceptable cost nor at reasonable speed. They are based on rigid production automation architecture designed to produce core products at high-volume and planned capacity in order to be profitable. Consequently, these systems cannot efficiently cope with variations in product demand. Why? To respond to demand change one must reconfigure production system, which is slow and expensive task for two main reasons: (a) reconfiguration is a complex task mostly done manually by highly skilled engineers and (b) it can take weeks to correctly adjust and tweak the largest systems and completing the task. As a consequence, the production systems cannot respond properly to changing market demands. When automation and robotization cannot cope with reshaped way of doing business, what can? Our solution should provide an answer. Namely, FlexInt enables the user of an automation system (for example Production Engineer) to autonomously execute the integration and reconfiguration of a production machine, e.g. industrial robot, without engaging teams of specialists, simply by applying his/her domain knowledge of manufacturing processes and of the machine. The rest is delivered by our Semantically Interoperable Data Integration, a set of digital platform and digital tools (applications), distinguished through their remarkable user experience and operational performance.