The constantly growing interest and range of applications of advanced cell, gene and regenerative therapies raise the need for efficient production of biological material and novel treatment technologies. Many of the production and manipulation processes of such materials are still manual and, therefore, need to be transferred to a fully automated execution. Developers of such systems face several challenges, one of which is mechanical and communication interfaces in biotechnological devices. In the present state, many devices are still designed for manual use and rarely provide a connection to external software for receiving commands and sending data. However, a trend towards automation on the device market is clearly visible, and the communication protocol, Open Platform Communications Data Access (OPC DA), seems to become established as a standard in biotech devices. A rising number of vendors offer software for device control and automated processing, some of which even allow the integration of devices from multiple manufacturers. The high, application-specific need in functionalities, flexibility and adaptivity makes it difficult to find the best solution and, in many cases, leads to the creation of new custom-designed software. This report shall give an overview of existing technologies, devices and software for laboratory automation of biotechnological processes. Furthermore, it presents an outlook for possible future developments and standardizations.

In manufacturing, rising demands for customized products have led to increased product variance and shortened product life cycles. In assembly lines, an increased variant diversity impedes the product flow. As a result, the utilization of assembly resources decreases, and production costs grow. An approach to increase the flexibility and adaptability of the assembly system is the implementation of the concept of line-less assembly. In the first step, the assembly line is dissolved. Then, stations are reallocated and linked by automated guided vehicles resulting in a loosely coupled layout, for example, a parallelization and interconnection of multiple lines or a matrix layout. A key requirement for the successful operation and control of a line-less assembly system is the collection and correct interpretation of data. To fully exploit the flexibility and adaptability of the concept of line-less assembly, a software architecture for planning and control must base on an information model allowing the fast integration of all shop floor assets and other data resources. Therefore, a modular data model with standardized interfaces for interoperable data exchange like a digital twin is needed. The aim of this paper is the development and implementation of a software architecture for planning and control of a line-less assembly system. Moreover, the architecture should integrate an interoperable digital twin of the physical system. To satisfy the criteria of interoperability and fast deployment, the digital twins are evolved following the methodology of a digital twin pipeline. Furthermore, a physical demonstrator serves as a testbed for the developed software architecture and digital twins. On the level of production planning and control, relevant industrial applications are identified and implemented in the form of use cases to show the functionality of the line-less assembly system as cyber-physical production system.

Durch gestiegene Variantenvielfalt wird in der Linienmontage der Produktfluss erschwert, die Stationsauslastung sinkt und die Kosten steigen. Einen Lösungsansatz bietet die frei verkettete Montage. Hierfür wird die Linie ähnlich dem Werkstattprinzip neu angeordnet und durch fahrerlose Transportfahrzeuge gekoppelt. Dieser Beitrag erklärt die Herausforderungen der frei verketteten Montage und wie deren Potenziale durch die Implementierung einer adaptiven Steuerungssoftware gehoben werden können.