OPAK stands for "Open engineering platform for autonomous, mechatronic automation components in function-oriented architecture". With this project, the partners involved want to set new standards in the control architecture and engineering processes of production systems. Professor Oliver Niggemann, Director of the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT) at OWL University of Applied Sciences, explains the motivation for this: "The main bottleneck in the adaptation and reconfiguration of production systems today is the programming of the automation software. De facto, however, there are not enough programmers on the market to constantly write or reprogram new software for a modularized plant model." OPAK's declared aim was therefore to create software that generates itself largely automatically.

Professor Oliver Niggemann: "Our solution increases the adaptability of technical systems and reduces the engineering effort involved in planning the automation solution."

© Centrum Industrial IT (CITT)

Modular, intelligent mechatronic components developed as part of the research project are intended to simplify the design and assembly of a production system. In addition, an algorithm generates large parts of the control code of a system automatically; only the mechatronic components involved and their capabilities are required.

Among other things, the researchers at inIT worked on the development of software that can control the complete commissioning and conversion of large factories itself. The research results were implemented in a demonstrator in the SmartFactoryOWL - a joint research and demonstration factory of Fraunhofer IOSB-INA and the OWL University of Applied Sciences. This multi-vendor system has a modular structure: Each module has its own decentralized control system and consists of automation components in a heterogeneous environment from different manufacturers. For example, a Raspberry PI with Codesys runtime environment is used as a small controller to control the modules. The entire system is fully networked on the basis of standards such as Ethernet, WLAN or OPC-UA.

The OPAK approach offers a visual interface with which an application can be implemented from predefined component descriptions and by calling up component skills. The writing of source code or function blocks and program code has been replaced by a graphical editor, the Codesys Application Composer. This development environment for creating/configuring application applications enables a completely new type of function-oriented engineering approach: in future, it will free the automation engineer from non-value-adding activities such as programming at signal level, thus placing the planning, design and optimization of automation processes back in the foreground.

The OPAK project was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) over a period of three years as part of the German government's largest Industry 4.0 research program "Autonomik für Industrie 4.0". The project partners inIT, Asys, 3S, Elrest, Festo, Fortiss and Intracom came from different areas - from research to component manufacturers and system integrators - and thus covered the entire value chain. The work at inIT alone was funded with almost half a million euros.