Search

With the emergence of new modern manufacturing paradigms new concepts, originally from the complexity sciences started to be introduced in the manufacturing systems, rendering traditional control approaches insufficient. Therefore, new approaches were developed, supported by the modern manufacturing paradigms bio-inspired background. However, somehow along the way the physical and logical nature of the system was partially lost, leading to the convergence of approaches towards more traditional systems, 'neglecting' their bio-inspired principles. With the present work the authors aim to introduce and analyse two new different self-organising approaches that try to bring the focus of manufacturing systems, again to the bio-inspired principles. For this purpose, in the context of this work, manufacturing systems are approached from a bottom-up perspective, in an attempt to reduce the specification of the production processes to the minimum and foster the production emergence. A test case is considered, to draw initial conclusions., QC 20140325

The emergence of modern manufacturing paradigms together with the growing interest on distributed architectures has been increasing the use of biologically inspired solutions. However, somehow along the way, developed approaches have converged towards more traditional systems where the physical and logical decoupled nature of the system has been partially lost. In this context, the presented work aims to introduce and analyse a new fully physically and logically decoupled bio-inspired self-organising approach that tries to bring to the mechatronic-agent based manufacturing architectures the dynamics of biological systems. Furthermore, the manufacturing systems are approached from a bottom-up perspective in an attempt to reduce the specification of the production processes to the minimum., QC 20140320

There is a substantial difference between traditional industrial systems and systems resultant from emerging production paradigms in terms of both conceptualization and implementation. Backwards compatibility is fundamental in assessing the potential transitional period whereby legacy technology will operate under the conceptual framework of modern approaches. However, before this point can be reached it is necessary to further investigate, assess and quantify the behavior of modern approaches that increasingly rely in self-organization. This article's goal is to give an overview of the behavioral assessment problematic, in the context of self-organizing mechatronic systems, and provide a discussion on opportunities to explore rule-extraction techniques to better understand the influence of design and configuration on the overall system behavior. Although the discussion widely applies to almost all emerging production paradigms the Evolvable Production System paradigm is used as case to bring context and clarity to the discussion., QC 20140327

Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) lies at the leading edge of the new paradigms currently emerging as a response to the continuously changing socio-economic challenges that modern enterprises have to deal with. Maximizing the profit under adverse market conditions is also a matter of cost cut and EPS targets this through an efficient diagnosis mechanism embedded in future production systems. Evolvable production systems goes beyond other manufacturing paradigms, and offers intelligent devices with biologically inspired behaviours, heavily dependent on self-diagnosis, self healing and other autonomous actions to ensure the systems' proper functioning and a timely response and recover from unpredictable situations., QC 20141029

Besides coping with the highly dynamic product and production system life cycles with ever-changing requirements, modern assembly systems also need to be user-friendly. Their modularity at fine granularity-level combined with local intelligence and a distributed control approach allows the systems to evolve together with the requirements - but their complexity would soon not be manageable from outside any more if user-friendliness was not considered a major criterion. Systems must be made to serve their users. Thanks to Self-* capabilities, systems can gain an increasingly high degree of autonomy. Diagnosis plays a particularly important role in this process., QC 20141104