# Towards a Flexible Smart Factory with a Dynamic Resource Orchestration
## 6 Conclusions  
Leaning towards the realisation of the 'assembly of anything' milestone and answering the main research questions established in the introduction, in this paper, we have presented the Orchestrator component of an SF, capable of dynamically orchestrating the resources and the complete production flow. It is a pluggable software system, that automatically extracts instructions from the given input, sets up the factory shop floor accordingly, and executes the production itself. The paper describes the architecture and system components, discusses the application of the Orchestrator on an assembly use-case, and provides a comparison with literature. The proof-of-concept in an industrial case study was discussed and is currently being evaluated by the EU-based manufacturer' experts and stakeholders: Plant managers, Process and Quality Engineers. This detailed examination of an isolated and experimental production line provided an insightful playground to find out to what extent is the proposed architecture applicable. Although the Orchestrator can be applied, there is still much room for improvement, and additional evaluation and efficiency analysis will be the topic of future research, with more structured results to follow. Meanwhile, some conclusions related to different parts of the presented system have been drawn and we present them in the rest of the conclusion. **The application of the Orchestrator is possible for the given domain** and assembly use-case, for discrete assembly of hardware components. The Orchestrator was used and operated on both abstract and formal levels by experienced domain experts. A Process Engineer created the Controller-A assembly process from scratch--using the available Process Modeller tool--and imported it to the KB. The Plant Manager previously fed the KB with information about participating shop floor resources, by using the provided Resource Modeller. Matchmaking and scheduling were carried out according to existing knowledge stored in KB and dynamic resource information stored in DT, upon which the factory-specific instructions were sent to the participating resources--robots and human operators. Execution of the assembly tasks could be carried out similarly to before the adaptation to the Orchestrator approach, as expected--without obvious differences in duration or complexity. The approach described in this paper is conceptually applicable to any analogous assembly use-case while enabling variability of the product being assembled. The application in other domains will follow. On one hand, it may be concluded that it is possible to create a system that would facilitate the automation of dynamic orchestration of shop floor resources. On the other hand, it is too early to draw final conclusions about the extent to which this is applicable, as the concrete results of the described use-case are still being collected and analysed. In addition to that, analysis in domains other than assembly will follow. **The semantic representation of all participating assets was essential for the matchmaking** of production resources and their capabilities. In line with expectations, the Orchestrator algorithms had no issues in establishing and reusing various shop floor assets stored in KB. Different shop floor resources were introduced to the system, includingnon-smart resources (non-augmented Human Operator). Although possible, a lot of effort is needed for KB to be ready in the first place, due to either the lack of use or lack of application of the standardised communication protocols [33]. Many transformations that are carried out to bring different devices and nomenclatures to the same--internal representation--will be replaced by a simpler and more efficient KB that relies less on these powerful transformations. As standardisation of all the manufacturing resources and their assets further progresses, the KB component will become more versatile.