Dr. Kuhn, an operating system for production plants. Have your original goals proved feasible? What results can you present?

Thomas Kuhn : In the BaSys 4.0 project, our task was to develop Industry 4.0 middleware that would enable versatile production. How we achieved this was largely left to us. We realized the goal of adaptable production with our service-based manufacturing architecture. The production process is not, as is often the case today, distributed on programmable logic controllers. Instead, the PLCs implement callable services that are called up by an orchestrator. Different services can be defined for each product. Changing the necessary recipes is much easier than reprogramming PLCs. Information about products and devices, such as the services offered and their costs, is stored uniformly in administration shells and their sub-models. These can be distributed, enabling access to a wide range of information via standardized interfaces. IT communicates with the devices on the store floor - it is even possible to control them via special sub-model interfaces. No other Industry 4.0 middleware currently allows this. We are also actively involved in ongoing standardization processes; we are the official reference implementation for the administration shell of the Industry 4.0 platform.

What does the resulting operating system look like?

Thomas Kuhn: Our operating system implements the software components as middleware that are needed to implement an Industry 4.0 solution. It comprises administration shells and submodels that provide structured data and support the networking of production.

Management component interfaces implement standardized interfaces to devices. Directory and server services implement the infrastructure for BaSys 4.0-compliant Industry 4.0 applications. BaSys 4.0 provides the software components required for the infrastructure and the software development kits to connect existing devices and applications. This already accounts for around 80% of the total effort. The remaining 20% of the integration work currently has to be done by the user.

Are there already companies or institutions that will use your results and put them into practice?

Thomas Kuhn : At the Hannover Messe 2019, Fraunhofer IESE signed a cooperation agreement with NetApp and objective Partner AG. Together, we offer Industry 4.0 solutions based on BaSys as Shopfloor 4.0 with full support and adaptation to customer systems. We are already receiving inquiries from customers who want to digitize their production processes.

Will your work come to an end with the completion of the project or are there follow-up projects?

Thomas Kuhn: There are actually several follow-up activities. The BMBF is supporting the installation of BaSys 4.0 solutions in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a double-digit number of BaSys satellites. Each satellite project addresses one to three SMEs with a wide range of applications, from predictive maintenance to adaptable production. Through close networking with these projects, we gain experience that is then fed back into the further development of the middleware. The core project BaSys 4.0 will be seamlessly followed by the follow-up project BaSys 4.2. Here we will extend BaSys to the process industry, further develop the continuous changeability of production processes and also provide tools to simplify the configuration of BaSys.

What vision do you ultimately want to realize?

Thomas Kuhn: Our vision is of autonomously changeable production that decides independently when, where and how something should be produced. This requires semantic models that describe the capabilities of devices, for example, and form the basis for autonomous production planning.

Editor's note: The results of the project can be downloaded as open source.