Designing an Integrated System for Smart Industry: The Development of the HORSE Architecture

The application of smart industry frameworks and technologies propels manufacturing into a new era with increased production flexibility, closed-loop quality management, more efficient use of resources, and more agile production processes. These characteristics lay the basis for the support of highly customized production, short lead times and increased product quality at lower prices – all characteristics that are demanded by the global market in which modern manufacturing finds itself. This book presents the approach and results of the five-year European HORSE project in the field of smart manufacturing. HORSE focuses on bringing flexible, safe human-robot collaboration and vertical and horizontal process support in an integrated fashion to the manufacturing work floor. The HORSE system is realized on the basis of a highly modular architecture, such that the system can be configured to the manufacturing context at hand. This architecture is aligned with the ISA95 and RAMI 4.0 frameworks. The book presents the development of the architecture, the realization of the prototype system, and the application of the system in ten industrial cases across Europe, discussing the details of seven of these. The book is aimed at manufacturing professionals, system integrators and consultants, researchers in the smart manufacturing domain, as well as advanced students in manufacturing curricula.