Transforming manufacturing industry through ICT

The Software Development for Manufacturing group is LMS’ response to transforming manufacturing through ICT solutions. The Software Development for Manufacturing supports other LMS groups in SW development and consequently software development activities span in a large application areas, utilizing the best of breed of libraries and tools including open-source and proprietary ones.

The key areas of the group with respect to Industry4.0 are:

  • Integration layer: The transition from Real to Digital World requires software and hardware solutions that transfer data from physical assets (e.g. sensors, production machines, industrial robots, PLC etc). It transforms asset’s ‘raw’ data into low-level context information (events), through a first processing stage that improves their representation and then stores it, if required.
  • Communication layer: Applications in the communication layer provide data to the information layer. Development of information models and use technologies that are required to enable communications in the shop floors and supply networks.
  • Information layer: Receives the information generated by the shop floor sources and the integration layer, and then it (a) processes data in order to obtain new and higher level information, (b) persists context data and © provides context data and high-level functionalities via the service interfaces.
  • Services and business layers: Applications covering several manufacturing industry needs such as scheduling, monitoring of production and supply chain, simulation, virtual and augmented reality applications, web applications

The Software Development for Manufacturing group utilizes different state of the art technologies for development purposes such as:

  • Software development practices and CI/CD tools such as SVN/GIT, Redmine, Maven/Gradle, Docker, Jenkins, Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ.
  • Programming languages such as Java, C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, and Javascript.
  • Databases, modelling and reasoning:
    • SQL Databases: Oracle, mySql
    • No SQL Apache Cassandra, MongoDB
    • Ontologies: Apache Jena, OWL.
  • State of the art frameworks and libraries such as Spring framework, Tensor Flow, Ruby On Rails, Robotics Operating System (ROS), Apache Camel
  • Communication & Data exchange technologies:
    • IoT based data communication standards: MQTT, OPCUA, NGSI.
    • Application communication: REST, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus).
    • Standard data exchange formats: JSON, STEP, XML, OWL, RDFS/RDF.
  • Front end application development: Angular, Bootstrap, Spring MVC, Ruby On Rails with responsiveness (HTML, JS, CSS) to support seamlessly browsers, smartphones and tablets.
  • Backend application development: Spring, Java EE
  • Robotics Applications Development:
    • Robotics Operating System (ROS, ROS2)
    • Robot programming languages such as: PDL (COMAU), Karel (Fanuc)
    • Motion Planning: MoveIt
  • Machine Learning & Statistics Development; Tensor Flow , R, Matlab