Towards a Reference Architecture for Planning and Control Services

Abstract

Producers of manufacturing equipment can, instead of just selling their products, also offer their customers services to increase customer satisfaction, gain competitive advantage, and increase their profits. These goals can be reached by helping the customers optimise their processes and improve their reliability and flexibility. This can be done by supporting the customer that invests in new manufacturing machines with a planning and control tool connecting the machines and the processes between them. More specifically, this will become possible by introducing and integrating active data management and analysis, and planning applications in the current architecture of companies. All of the processes currently being done manually in the customer companies, from monitoring to production planning based on direct observation and the experience of production managers, can be automated using these applications. This paper presents a reference architecture supporting the connection of these processes using the mentioned applications, and validates the developed models based on a real case study of a production machine manufacturer and its customers.