Globalization, technological advances and societal trends are reflected in manufacturing by larger and more complex products, individualization and smaller lot sizes, tighter tolerances as well as the pursuit of shorter cycle times, higher degree of automation and resilience, improved cost-efficiency and sustainability. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) reacting to these requirements lead to metrology becoming a indispensable enabler to provide synchronization between real world systems and virtual models required to implement adaptive automation and subsequent control loops.
This thesis introduces and investigates the Coordinates as a Service (CaaS) paradigm. It aims at making available the benefits of a virtual reference coordinate frame based on multiple, heterogeneous Large-Scale Metrology (LSM) instruments to applications constituting CPPS and relying on ubiquitous spatial synchronization. Moreover, the servitization concept allows for the separation of coordinates as provided information from the underlying measurement instruments.
The course of research commences with the introduction of a novel, artifact-free method to register the local coordinate systems of heterogeneous LSM instrument to provide a common, global coordinate system. Following the unification on physical level, an abstraction on interface level using a functional, technology-independent model for the individual LSM instruments and standardized Internet of Things (IoT) protocols is developed. To further achieve the amalgation of necessary information and data flows and their integration into the shop floor's infrastructure, a reference architecture for CaaS is elaborated using a decomposition into individual microservices as approach to satisfy the requirements of modern manufacturing IT. Adhering to the service-oriented design, the individual instruments are considered as resources of CaaS, such that an approach to resource management based on descriptive models and a novel metric is investigated.
To validate the outcome of the individual design cycles, a CaaS reference system using laser trackers, indoor GPS and ultrawideband systems as well as a machine tool is implemented at WZL's laboratory for Metrology, Assembly and Robotic Systems. The implementation is accompanied by the elaboration of a reusable multi-layer IT architecture. Both the CaaS reference system and IT architecture are used in reference applications, concluding a successful validation.