The shift from traditional industrial automation to customized mass production, a central objective of Industry 4.0, brings challenges and opportunities for European manufacturing companies. To remain competitive in global markets, these companies must enhance the productivity of their production facilities by adopting flexible, modular, and reconfigurable production lines that offset Europe’s high labor costs. A reconfigurable manufacturing system is specifically designed to enable rapid structural and functional changes, allowing production capacity and capabilities to adapt swiftly to dynamic market demands.
Achieving rapid reconfiguration of production facilities is a key prerequisite for realizing customized mass production, often referred to as "lot-size-one" manufacturing. However, beyond the reconfiguration of machines and their software, this flexibility must also extend to the safety systems that protect people, equipment, and the environment. Today, functional safety systems are typically designed and certified in a static manner: their safety configurations are defined during the design phase and remain unchanged once the system is commissioned and approved for operation. This static approach limits the flexibility required by modern smart manufacturing environments. Moreover, current safety configuration processes are highly manual, resulting in significant engineering effort, high costs, and long, expensive downtimes.
The project "Flexible Safety Systems" addresses the need for a new approach by developing a framework and set of services for functional safety systems that can be reconfigured rapidly and easily, even after commissioning and during operation. The concept builds on established, safety-certified communication technologies and introduces services for device discovery, automatic configuration generation, and seamless deployment. It also lays the groundwork for advanced features such as automated risk assessment, safety verification, validation, and evaluation. In addition, assistive functions like regulatory compliance checks and AI-driven configuration generation are envisioned.
Finally, this project seeks to enable safe and compliant reconfiguration of safety systems in active production environments, supporting operators in making configuration changes quickly, intuitively, and in full accordance with legal and safety requirements.
