Architecture Synthesis for Optimized and Flexible Production

abstract

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) anticipates frequent synthesis and optimization of different architectural design decisions (ADDs) – such as deployment of software components to hardware components, service composition, production planning, and topology (plant layout) synthesis. The frequent manual search for valid and optimal architectural designs is a time- and cognition-consuming task for an engineer. This asks for automating the process of deriving different ADDs. Although automating different ADDs is intensely investigated in other domains, the current research works 1) require higher engineering effort for specifying architecture optimization problems; 2) conduct (only) sequential ADDs, leading to lower solution quality (i.e., sub-optimal production); 3) neglect reconfigurability and reliability of architectures, and, thereby, offer no solution for production downtime; 4) neglect event-based execution semantics while considering timing-related issues. Therefore, I propose a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT)-based framework for joint synthesis and optimization of multi-dimensional ADDs using industrial automation domain models (e.g., plant topology, product recipes, stations capabilities, etc.). This research should bring the following benefits for the practitioners and researchers: 1) reduction of engineering effort for conducting different ADDs; 2) improvement of different quality attributes (e.g., production performance, reconfigurability, reliability, etc.); 3) guideline/support for a practitioner in choosing ADDs workflow to improve given quality attributes.