Manufacturing companies today have to deal with a wide variety of complex challenges. These include batch size ranges from batch size 1 to larger series and, last but not least, dealing with delays and failures in the supply chains. It was precisely this challenge that several Fraunhofer Institutes tackled in the lead project 'SWAP - Heterogeneous, workload-optimized robot teams and production architectures', as part of which the 'SWAP-IT' architecture was developed. The technological concept comprehensively maps the requirements of tomorrow's production. It enables a transformation from rigidly interlinked single-purpose production systems to flexible and dynamic networks of processing stations. The focus is on modular production systems that support both centrally and decentrally organized components. The modules can be adapted to the requirements of the production environment and can be further developed with little effort.

To this end, the Fraunhofer Groups 'Production', 'Light & Surfaces' and 'ICT' have pooled their interdisciplinary expertise to develop a joint architecture that can now be used in the automotive production, mechanical engineering, aircraft construction and electrical engineering sectors.
Architecture and description language ready for launch as open source from the end of 2024

An important step towards a cyber-physical production system ready for implementation is the order-centered production environment, in which production orders are orchestrated using a specially developed description language, the Production Flow Description Language (PFDL), and delivered to the processing stations. This PDFL formalizes production orders and controls orders fully automatically. The production resources can be allocated dynamically at runtime with the architecture solution, which enables a rapid response to failures or short-term order peaks.
Both the architecture and PFDL of SWAP-IT will be available as open source in future for expansion into a modular production architecture.