Design of device adapter enabling plug & produce for intelligent manufacturing production line

Aiming at the problem that traditional manufacturing production lines are difficult to meet the increasingly customized product requirements due to their poor flexibility and adaptability, a design framework and implementation method for the intelligent device adapters that followed the model-driven concept were proposed. Firstly, the importance of model-driven approach based on the requirements of production line for customization was explained; then a variety of mainstream hardware interfaces and software communication protocols of devices in the modern manufacturing field were analysed. By this means, the software and hardware systems of the device adapters were designed in a modular manner, so that the ability to automatically perceive the surrounding environment and communicate externally with the standard service interfaces of OPC UA was achieved. Finally, the results of the functional verification carried out on the production line prototype platform show that the intelligent device adapters can automatically register the metadata of devices based on the self-description model to the service catalog, and the communication protocols and data description formats of devices can also be uniformly adapted to OPC UA, so as to realize the capability of plug & produce without manual intervention.