An XML-based Factory Description Language for Smart Manufacturing Plants in Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 revolution concerns the digital transformation of manufacturing and promises to answer the ever-increasing demand of product customisation and manufacturing flexibility while incurring low costs. To perform the required factory reconfiguration, a computationally demanding optimisation process has to be executed to find favourable solutions in a relatively short time. While previous research focused on planning and scheduling of smart factories based on cloud-based optimisation, little attention has been paid to effective approaches to describe the targeted factory, the required products and the production processes. However, these matters are fundamental for the optimisation engine to be correctly and efficiently performed. This paper presents an XML-based factory modelling language to effectively describe the above data for a given factory and commodity order and to provide a convenient interface for altering the input information. Finally, two real-world manufacturing plants are provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed description language.