The performance of product-driven manufacturing control: An emulation-based benchmarking study

Product-driven control may enable manufacturing companies to meet business demands more quickly and effectively. But a key point in making this concept acceptable by industry is to provide benchmarking environments in order to compare and analyze their efficiency on emulated large-scale industry-led case studies with regard to current technologies and approaches. In this paper, a benchmarking protocol is defined, in order to provide R&D practitioners with benchmarking services in a product-driven implementation project. A component-based generic architecture is proposed to support this protocol, enabling to model and compare various control architectures. This benchmarking protocol is applied to an automotive-industry case study in order to evaluate the impact of making the products interact with the local decision centers. Finally the experiments show that product-driven control can perform as good as traditional centralized control, and that its robustness depends mainly of the local decision-making processes.