Functional Requirements for Reconfigurable and Flexible Cyber-Physical System

A truly global market characterized by aggressive competition on a global scale and rapid changes in process technology requires creating production systems that are easy to upgrade, being able to readily integrate new technologies and new functions. In these terms, PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) a European funded project, aims at developing an innovative manufacturing system based on a new agile concept introducing the implementation of methods and methodologies for transforming existing production systems into plug-and-produce production ones based on Cyber-Physical Systems technologies. In particular, this paper aims at describing a methodology leading to identification and deployment of general business and strategic requirements needed to implement new plug-and-produce paradigms into traditional production systems. This approach mainly based on the Requirement Engineering methodology (RE) also leads to the identification of an appropriate set of KPIs (technical and business) able to measure and to benchmark collected requirements. Four Industrial Use Cases have been analyzed, taking the CPS-5C architecture as reference model to map their AS-IS and TO-BE situations with respect to their CPS attitude, confirming the possibility to use this approach among different manufacturing sectors, for large companies, SMEs as well as for new and existing small plants.