A Unified Status Dashboard for Workflow Automation

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Soltani, Pooria and Gahler, Daniel and Abbas, Faisal and Markl, Daniel (2026) A Unified Status Dashboard for Workflow Automation. In: CMAC Open Days 2026, 2026-03-24 - 2026-03-26, Technology and Innovation Centre.

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Abstract

As CMAC moves toward a fully automated lab that uses DataFactories for material-sparing high-throughput experimentation to explore material-process-product relationships, it is essential to determine lab device availability without human intervention. This project presents a Python-based status dashboard designed to aggregate and visualise the real-time status of automation units of DataFactories within the CMAC Data Lab. The system supports devices communicating via standardised protocols, i.e., OPC UA and HTTP protocols, and utilises custom parsers to standardise status outputs (e.g., Idle, Busy, Error, Offline), which addresses the challenge of unifying the broad range of devices available in the lab in one dashboard. The architecture follows a flexible, OOP-based hierarchy - ranging from service groups to individual device extensions - and uses a JSON configuration file which is automatically reloaded and allows new entities to be added without server downtime. The roadmap for future implementation will replace the current file-based state management toward a database-backed architecture capable of logging historical sustainability metrics. Furthermore, we will be exploring WebSocket integration, which would allow for fast, individual service status updates as they become available and role-based user management, enabling authorised users to execute remote commands and receive event-based alerts.

ORCID iDs

Soltani, Pooria, Gahler, Daniel ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9313-8899, Abbas, Faisal ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2323-278X and Markl, Daniel ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0411-733X;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)