The value of data analytics is fundamental in cyber-physical production systems for tasks like optimization and predictive maintenance. The de facto standard for conducting data analytics in industrial applications is the CRISP-DM methodology. However, CRISP-DM does not specify a data acquisition phase within production scenarios. With this chapter, we present DMME as an extension to the CRISP-DM methodology specifically tailored for engineering applications. It provides a communication and planning foundation for data analytics within the manufacturing domain, including the design and evaluation of the infrastructure for process-integrated data acquisition. In addition, the methodology includes functions of design of experiments capabilities to systematically and efficiently identify relevant interactions. The procedure of DMME methodology is presented in detail and an example project illustrates the workflow. This case study was part of a collaborative project with an industrial partner who wanted an application to detect marginal lubrication in linear guideways of a servo-driven axle based only on data from the drive controller. Decision trees detect the lubrication state, which are trained with experimental data. Several experiments, taking the lubrication state, velocity, and load on the slide into account, provide the training and test datasets.

Data-driven methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) are powerful yet flexible tools for gathering knowledge and automating complex tasks in many areas of science and practice. Despite the rapid development of the field, the existing potential of AI methods to solve recent industrial, corporate and social challenges has not yet been fully exploited. Research shows the insufficient practicality of AI in domain-specific contexts as one of the main application hurdles. Focusing on industrial demands, this publication introduces a new paradigm in terms of applicability of AI methods, called Usable AI (UAI). Aspects of easily accessible, domain-specific AI methods are derived, which address essential user-oriented AI services within the UAI paradigm: usability, suitability, integrability and interoperability. The relevance of UAI is clarified by describing challenges, hurdles and peculiarities of AI applications in the production area, whereby the following user roles have been abstracted: developers of cyber–physical production systems (CPPS), developers of processes and operators of processes. The analysis shows that target artifacts, motivation, knowledge horizon and challenges differ for the user roles. Therefore, UAI shall enable domain- and user-role-specific adaptation of affordances accompanied by adaptive support of vertical and horizontal integration across the domains and user roles.

With the boom of Industry 4.0 for industrial automation, the data exchange between the different industrial devices has tremendously increased through local (edge) and cloud computing. Nowadays, several communication protocols are available to realize data acquisition in the industry. As a result, understanding the practical capabilities of each communication protocol arises as an essential issue in optimizing the data acquisition and storage in industrial plants. This study aims to develop a software-based test environment to evaluate the performance of two widely used communication protocols within the scope of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These contemplated protocols are Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). With the help of the developed test environment, several performance metrics, like packet overhead, latency, packet loss ratio, and CPU utilization, are evaluated for different application scenarios where the varying number of clients and subscribers are considered. Derived results indicate the stronger parts of each protocol under varying communication configurations.

In motion control, the generation of motion profiles for non-linear kinematics is usually computationally complex. In order to minimize the workload on the machine’s control system, the approach pursued is outsourcing complex calculation tasks to the offline area. In this offline motion preparation, predefined criteria have to be taken into account to guarantee process stability on the real machine. During the motion preparation, a high performance is desired, characterized by less data generated and at the same time little computing effort. The evaluation will use the example of a motion specification, which is characterized by a large amount of data compared to conventional motion specifications. Thus, the demands on performance become even higher. This paper examines the performance of different motion preparation approaches known from literature. On the one hand, selected spline-based algorithms are discussed and compared. A recursive algorithm based on monomial splines is recommended for use in the example. On the other hand, a very simple approach based on the linearization of the non-linear workspace of the mechanism is presented and applied on the algorithms. With this, the performance increased significantly again.