Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

 

Home

• [P263] Implementing Self-Management for Evolvable Assembly Systems
  Author(s): Regina Frei, Bruno Ferreira, Giovanna di Marzo Serugendo, Jose Barata
  
  

  Abstract
  Agile manufacturing requires high responsiveness at all levels of a company, but is especially challenging on the shop-floor level. Assembly systems need to cope with low production volumes, many variants and rapidly changing conditions. Considering these requirements, current solutions for industrial manufacturing assembly systems are not suitable any more. Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS) are an answer to industry's increasing need for agility in the shop-floor. Modules are agentified; they can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems, or removed at any instant. EAS offer a more flexible solution to automation production, but many tasks are still done manually. Our goal is to make EAS increasingly self-managing: 1. to easily and quickly produce a new or re-configured assembly system each time a new product order arrives or each time a failure or weakness arises in the current assembly system - without requiring user interaction and 2. to maintain production also under degraded conditions. This article describes the current status of our implementation of self-managing evolvable assembly systems involving on-the-fly self-assembly of robotic modules, dynamic coordination of tasks and self-adaptation to production conditions, mainly self-healing and self-optimisation. The implementation exploits self-description of modules, monitored modules behaviour and dynamic policies.

  
   

Full Text (PDF)