Design and engineering processes in highly adaptive plants with ambient intelligence techniques

Ever more complex engineering processes, shorter product lifecycles, increasing cost pressure and a wider range of product variants force plant manufacturers and operators to enhance adaptivity and interoperability of their plants. In addition to the modularization of hardware, this requires a high degree of flexibility of the associated software. In view of these challenges methods and mechanisms have been developed in the ProduFlexil research project resulting in modified requirements for the plant planning procedure. In this article changes will be contrasted with the state of the art. Thereby, both, advantages and challenges of the ‘automation of automation’ will be highlighted.