Designing Intelligent Factory: Conceptual Framework and Empirical Validation

This paper presents a framework for monitoring, analysing and decision making for a smart manufacturing environment. We maintain that this approach could play a vital role in developing an architecture and implementation of Industry 4.0. The proposed model has features like experience based knowledge representation and semantic analysis of engineering objects and manufacturing process. It is also capable of continuous real time visualization of key performance indicators (KPI's) and supports M2M communications over novel protocols like OPC-UA. Our model covers the industrial manufacturing cycle right from capturing raw data at machine level, converting it into useful information, doing semantics analysis and performs real time KPI visualization.