Do Not Cancel My Race with Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract To engineer the factory of the future the paper argues for a reference model that is not necessary restricted to the control component, but integrates the physical and human components as well. This is due to the real need to accommodate the latest achievements in factory automation where the human is not merely playing a simple and clear role inside the control-loop, but is becoming a composite factor in a highly automated system (“man in the mesh”). The concept is demonstrated by instantiating the anthropocentric cyber-physical reference architecture for smart factories (ACPA4SF) in a concrete case study that needs to accommodate the ongoing researches from the SmartFactory KL fa…