The production of goods requires increasingly complex production facilities. The effort required for planning, configuration and commissioning is increasing and accordingly, so are the costs. On the other hand, customers expect the manufacturing industry to adapt more quickly to new product variants while at the same time decreasing quantity structures. This requires manufacturers to flexibly adapt their production.

More flexible production can only be achieved at reasonable cost through modularization. This must already be considered during the planning of a production plant. Digitization offers an opportunity to manage this demanding situation.

Currently, changes in production systems are usually made by system integrators who used individual "black boxes" from different equipment suppliers to build "static" production systems. The use of standardized equipment modules, if properly considered in the planning process, could significantly increase flexibility in production system changeovers. To this end, NAMUR and ZVEI have drawn up a set of requirements in a position paper and published it under the term Module Type Package (MTP). With MTP, it is possible to combine different modules in an intelligent way to form an overall production process.

The Module Type Package is the heart of modular production. Modular automation enables particularly fast and efficient engineering of individual production units encapsulated in process and automation technology. Based on the MTP concept, which gives the individual modules a digital description, the modules can then be interconnected in a manufacturer-independent and flexible manner via a so-called orchestration system.

Modular production with MTP is now considered an important part of the digitization of the manufacturing industry. It is expected that important KPIs of plants can be significantly improved with MTP. On average, experts believe that time-to-market can be halved, engineering efforts reduced by 70 percent and flexibility increased by 80 percent.

NAMUR and ZVEI have entrusted PROFIBUS&PROFINET International (PI) with the orchestration of further development, driving international standardization, IP management, and the organization of promotional activities of MTP. All activities are carried out in close cooperation with NAMUR and ZVEI.

A first presentation of MTP can be found at the PNO booth at SPS. Interested parties are welcome to ask the booth staff about the status and upcoming steps.

PROFINET has become the leading Industrial Ethernet Standard in all industries of factory and process automation. This globally established and future-oriented technology is supported by many product vendors, thus ensuring long-term availability and investment protection. The flexible architecture of PROFINET with its extensive range of functions enables innovative, flexible and cost-saving automation of production processes not only in plants but also in machines. As technology that is standard in the automotive industry, widely spread in machine building, and well-proven in the food and packaging and logistics industries, as well as recently in process industries, PROFINET has found its way into all application areas.

omlox, is an open locating standard that provides enterprise applications a consistent view of everything that moves in logistics and production.omlox standardizes software and hardware aspects of real-time locating systems (RTLS), ensuring they are affordable and accessible for organizations of any size, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).Through the standardized APIs, all locating technologies can be integrated into a solution – irrespective of the vendor. This interoperability opens the door to a wide spectrum of use-cases and guarantees scalability, flexibility, and cost reduction.The general architecture of omlox consists of three key components:

• omlox hub – a locating middle-ware that harmonizes location data from any source (i.e., omlox zones). It transforms local location data into standardized into global geo-references data and provides real-time events for motion, fencing and collisions via the standardized omlox hub API.
• omlox core zone – a wireless locating infrastructure - based on ultra-wideband (UWB) - that locates devices from different vendors in real-time. This reduces the TCO dramatically and enables new use-cases.
• omlox complementary zones – any other existing locating technology, such RFID, Wi-Fi, BLE, 5G, can be connected to an omlox hub in order to get a holistic view of everything that moves in production and logistics.

IO-Link is a point-to-point interface for the low-cost connection of smart/intelligent devices serving the lowest level of automation (see right - click the image to enlarge). Devices at this level were once exclusively 'on/off' types, but increasingly they offer higher performance capabilities such as configuration on-the-fly, higher resolutions and enhanced operations.

They incorporate greater processing power and need faster and more intelligent communications with controller devices. IO-Link serves this need with a flexible solution that is fieldbus-independent. IO-Link is flexible because it is designed to work with traditional devices without modification so installing an IO-Link network is extremely easy. Existing sensor networks can also be easily upgraded to incorporate the newer device types.