Assembly Workstation 4.0: Concept, Framework and Research Perspectives for Assembly Systems Implementation in the Industry 4.0 Era

Assembly workstation, as the basic building block for assembly systems implementation, involves the coupling of various resources to perform parts combination, and its performance is determined by the interaction of the resources. In the era of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), the penetration of emerging technologies leads to the intelligent networking of hyper objects with hyper-automation and hyper-connectivity, which radically reforms the organization and operation of assembly workstations and brings it into the era of "Assembly Workstation 4.0 (AW4.0)". To keep pace with the industrial revolution, this paper attempts to provide a basis for revealing the paradigm of AW4.0 based on the existing pioneering research and practice in I4.0. To this end, firstly, a 6-tuple model orchestrated by hyper objects is proposed to define AW4.0 compliance with I4.0 principles and Human-Cyber-Physical System (HCPS) paradigm. After that, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is introduced to provide the foundation for hyper objects orchestration within AW4.0, and the resulting new functionalities are demonstrated through a full-scale prototype. Finally, research perspectives based on three-dimensional synchronization strategies are given for the effective and efficient operation and management of AW4.0, contributing to exploring the potential benefits that may emerge brought by the consistency of hyper objects orchestration.