"Efficiency, agility and flexibility are indispensable when building current and future factories.
fischertechnik is now introducing a training model of such a flexible and modular factory – the Agile Production Simulation. The factory consists of individual modules such as a delivery and pick up station, high bay warehouse, milling station, drilling station, quality control with AI. A automated guided vehicle flexibly transports workpieces between the individual stations and ensures a flexible production process that can be adapted to customer requirements. The factory can be expanded to include an annealing furnace and additional driverless transport systems.
Each workpiece contains an NFC tag on which production data is written (color of the workpiece, time of delivery, time of storage and retrieval, production steps carried out, quality inspection carried out). The different colored workpieces (white, red, blue) go through different production processes and thus pass through different stations in the factory and have different throughput times.
The factory is controlled by a central control system (Raspberry Pi 4 Model B), which is networked with the controllers of the individual factory modules, PLC Siemens S7 1200. The central control system communicates via the standardized VDA 5050 AGV interface and controls the transport orders for the AGV. The MQTT protocol (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is used for communication.
The factory is also connected to the fischertechnik cloud via a WLAN router, which includes an online shop for customers to order workpieces. In addition, dashboards are available for order control, visualizing the factory status, and determining key figures. To simulate remote maintenance, the images captured by the movable camera in the factory are displayed in the dashboard so that the status of the factory can be viewed remotely.
The base plates of the individual modules in the factory are physically connected to each other using a tongue and groove principle to form a continuous base plate. Further modules can be added at the open ends and configured in the dashboard.
The accompanying didactic material offers a detailed introduction to how to use the factory, as well as extensive teaching material. Topics include the basics of Industry 4.0, modular production, intelligent networking, human-technology-organization, digital twin, real-time sensor data evaluation and much more."
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