Smart manufacturing rethought: process-driven systems in practice
The research project PDA RobE shows how AI, Digital Twin and process automation are transforming manufacturing for the long term
by Markus Herhoffer
Industrial companies are under growing pressure: shorter innovation cycles, rising customer requirements and regulatory sustainability requirements are massively increasing complexity in manufacturing. Instead of real data integration, many companies are still dominated by data silos, fragmented workflows and manual interfaces. The result: slow response times, incomplete decision bases and missed opportunities.
With the research project PDA RobE, carried out in cooperation with FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and Continental Autonomous Mobility, we show a new approach. The whitepaper “How process-driven systems are revolutionizing smart manufacturing” describes how executable BPMN models, event-based orchestration via Apache Kafka and building a knowledge graph create an end-to-end, process-driven architecture.
This architecture connects engineering, operations and shop floor in real time. It allows AI-supported analysis, accelerates approval processes and creates the basis for digital twins that do not only depict current states but also enable historical data and simulation. Concrete scenarios from the project illustrate the benefit: an AI in the shop floor process was able to deliver useful solution proposals in more than 87 % of cases and reduce downtime considerably. Engineering changes were also accelerated by more than ten working hours through automation.
The whitepaper makes clear that anyone who wants to implement smart manufacturing successfully has to go beyond isolated technology implementations and pursue a holistic, interoperable platform strategy. PDA RobE and the explore platform create a scalable ecosystem that makes companies more agile, more efficient and more resilient and thereby lays the foundation for the manufacturing of the future.