A Virtual Environment for the Management and Development of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Systems

:Modern machineries are often cyber-physical system-of-systems controlled by intelligent controllers for collaborative operations on the productions of complex products. To assure the efficiency and effectiveness, a consolidation of concerns across managerial levels, product lifecycle stages, and product lines or families becomes necessary. This calls for a common information infrastructure in terms of ontology, models, methods and tools. For industrial manufacturers subjected to increased cost pressure and market volatility, the availability of such an information infrastructure would promote their abilities of making optimized and proactive decisions and thereby their competitiveness and survivability. This paper presents a virtual environment that constitutes an information infrastructure for the management and development of evolvable production systems (EPS) in manufacturing. It adopts mature modeling frameworks through EAST-ADL for an effective model-based approach. The contribution is centered on a meta-model that offers a common data specification and semantic basis for information management across product lifecycle, models and tools, both for resource planning and for anomaly treatment. A prototype tool implementation of this virtual environment for validation is also presented.