Separation of concerns on the orchestration of operations in flexible manufacturing

The growing complexity of industrial robot work-cells calls for the use of advanced orchestration techniques to promote flexibility and reusability. This paper presents a solution based on service-oriented platforms that endorses the separation of concerns, coordination and execution. The execution is kept inside each individual device and their functionality is exposed via automatic generation of services. The orchestration is performed in a cell controller that uses a state-chart engine to achieve the cell behaviour. The statecharts defined for this engine are work-cell programs without implicit dependencies on the services and therefore reusable and easily maintainable. From the early evaluations made in this paper the SCXML based purposed language is more adapted to the industrial robotic cell scenario than existing alternatives. The generation of services allow the integration without knowledge of any programming language.