Samenvatting

Author supplied: Abstract—The growing importance and impact of new technologies
are changing many industries. This effect is especially
noticeable in the manufacturing industry. This paper explores a
practical implementation of a hybrid architecture for the newest
generation of manufacturing systems. The papers starts with
a proposition that envisions reconfigurable systems that work
together autonomously to create Manufacturing as a Service
(MaaS). It introduces a number of problems in this area and
shows the requirements for an architecture that can be the
main research platform to solve a number of these problems,
including the need for safe and flexible system behaviour and the
ability to reconfigure with limited interference to other systems
within the manufacturing environment. The paper highlights
the infrastructure and architecture itself that can support the
requirements to solve the mentioned problems in the future. A
concept system named Grid Manufacturing is then introduced
that shows both the hardware and software systems to handle
the challenges. The paper then moves towards the design of
the architecture and introduces all systems involved, including
the specific hardware platforms that will be controlled by the
software platform called REXOS (Reconfigurable EQuipletS
Operating System). The design choices are provided that show
why it has become a hybrid platform that uses Java Agent
Development Framework (JADE) and Robot Operating System
(ROS). Finally, to validate REXOS, the performance is measured
and discussed, which shows that REXOS can be used as a
practical basis for more specific research for robust autonomous
reconfigurable systems and application in industry 4.0. This
paper shows practical examples of how to successfully combine
several technologies that are meant to lead to a faster adoption
and a better business case for autonomous and reconfigurable
systems in industry.