Requirements and concept for Plug-and-Work Adaptivity in the context of Industry 4.0

Objects to change within a manufacturing enterprise can be products, technological or logistical processes, parts of the manufacturing facilities or a company's organization. For this paper we assume, that IT systems are also objects to change - they have to be adapted to changes to products and facilities on the shop floor. Today the adaption of IT systems is managed and done manually - therefore the authors propose an automated way of changing the production's IT-systems. For this purpose two main ideas are described: reading and interpreting a self-description of production equipment and enrichment of these descriptions with data from the digital factory bridging the gap between planning and operating IT-systems and thus enabling higher adaptivity of manufacturing systems.