Event-driven manufacturing: Unified management of primitive and complex events for manufacturing monitoring and control

Events are an integral part of todays manufacturing supervision and control software. However, state-of-the-art event management systems only cover selected levels of the automation pyramid, thus limiting the possibilities for holistic event-driven manufacturing monitoring and control. We propose a unified management of events across all levels of the automation pyramid. Thereby we utilize primitive and complex/composite events, i.e. logical or temporal combinations of primitive events to enable realtime shop floor control. We provide a comprehensive description of the overall architecture and the components necessary for a unified event management system based on the Publish/Subscribe paradigm. We detail the opportunities and challenges in applying the concept of complex event processing to the domain of manufacturing.