Python is not exclusively a powerful tool for datascience and web-development. It gains in importance on the shopfloor in industrial production, too. Increasing unit labour costs and the imperative need to reduce energy consumption raises the need to enhance productivity in industrial production in general.

For GKN Aerospace, as the world’s leading tier one aerospace supplier of systems and components, this leads to higher utilization and unmanned operation of a high variety of production processes and CNC-machining tools. On its site in Kongsberg, Norway, GKN produces mainly turbine shafts and casings for civil and military engines, which are used for up to 100.000 flights every day around the globe.

The programming language Python enables fast and forward-thinking development of powerful applications which supports the operators and increases the degree of automation in the next years by concurrent assurance to fulfill demanding quality requirements and to cope the workload.

Standardization of applications is a key factor for increasing robustness of the automated production and reduce maintenance effort. Therefore a standardized interface to NC-controller and PLC’s from the “pre ASCII era” in the 70ies to up-to-date systems had to be found and suitable gateway services had to be developed.

As an example for the usage of Python on the GKN shopfloor in Norway, a standardized in-house developed “Production Execution System”, consisting of a Python backend and a REACT frontend is presented. Connected to more than 25 different machining tools on the shopfloor and additional digital services of the company’s IT environment, the application orchestrates all necessary data on cell-level. It provides data, like NC-programs and part meta-data to the machining tools and additional process information to the operators, necessary to produce a high variety of different engine components.

It enables unmanned production by selecting the next part for machining and commanding part changes to the machine to maximize utilization of the means of production. Furthermore, it reports back collected data for usage by other processes downstream in production.

Cloud-based and due to its restart capability in running production, bugfixes and implementation of new features can be carried out “on-the-fly”. Thereby automated unit- and integration testing for the core functionalities ensure robustness for the high variety of used machining tools.

The development and usage of the “Production Execution System” on GKN Aerospace’s shopfloor are an excellent example for the increasing importance of the programming language Python to ensures highest quality of engine parts in a work environment of increasing digitalization and workload.