A novel I4.0-enabled engineering method and its evaluation

Recent trends show that products are becoming more complex and multi-variant. Therefore, future production systems need to become more advanced in terms of reconfigurability, flexibility, and transformability. To achieve these advancements, future systems must be highly changeable and support plug-and-produce approaches. The majority of today’s engineering methods focus on static workflows based on predefined assets and setups. As a consequence, changes in the production system come with high costs, especially during production process execution. Therefore, new engineering methods are required which are explicitly designed for highly changeable production systems. To contribute towards fully changeable production systems, an I4.0 framework is proposed that covers the entire engineering process. The focus is set on presenting a graphical I4.0-enabled engineering method that enables dynamic workflows with varying assets and setups. Moreover, in order to evaluate the method, a user study was conducted, in which participants were asked to solve multiple engineering tasks by utilizing the presented I4.0-enabled method as well as a conventional approach. The results indicated that the proposed I4.0-enabled engineering method significantly outperformed the conventional method in terms of required engineering times and subjective ratings.