Smart Power Tools: An Industrial Event-Driven Architecture Implementation

In order to remain competitive, more and more industries are embracing the concept of industry 4.0 and trying to improve their manufacturing systems. A modern manufacturing system is the one which provides the industry with flexibility to adopt to the constantly changing market demands. In order to be flexible, the manufacturing system should be able to make better use of the shop floor data. Data from the shop floor level should be available in real time to facilitate the decision making process. The process of implementation of an event driven architecture along with services in a real time production environment will be discussed in this paper. For this purpose, pedal car line at Scania Sodertalje is analyzed for the implementation of event driven architecture. The old hand held tools and controllers at the assembly stations were replaced with modern wireless power tools and the latest power focus 6000 controller. The data generated by the power tools was converted into a standard format so that it can easily be interpreted by a message broker. The messages were published on Kafka message bus where other systems were able to subscribe and consume the data. A couple of endpoints were created, one was a REST API that subscribed to the message bus and consumed the data from power tools and visualized key parameters for the operator at the shop floor in real time. Second service created was to calculate certain KPIs and visualize them in graphs form for the maintenance and production engineers. This implementation demonstrated that an event driven architecture such as LISA can be implemented on a real shop floor making real time data available to different systems.