Self-Organising Industrial Assembly Systems



Introduction

Current solutions for industrial manufacturing assembly systems do not suit the needs of Mass Customization industry, which is facing low production volumes, many variants and rapidly changing conditions. An assembly system is an industrial installation able to receive parts and join them in a coherent way to form the final product. It consists of a set of equipment items (modules) such as conveyors, pallets, simple robotic axes for translation and rotation as well as more sophisticated industrial robots, grippers, sensors of various types, etc.). An Evolvable Assembly System (EAS) is an assembly system which can co-evolve together with the product and the processes (assembly operations); it can easily undergo small and big changes and seamlessly integrates new modules independent from their brand or model.This project extends the notion of EAS with self-organizing principles: assembly system modules and product parts to be assembled organize together (among others, choose their coalition partners, their location and monitor themselves) in order to easily and quickly produce a new or reconfigured assembly system each time a new product order arrives or each time a failure or weakness arises in the current assembly system.

Approach

The self-organizing and self-adaptive architecture that we propose to use follows a service-oriented architecture. It exploits metadata to support decision-making and adaptation based on the dynamic enforcement of explicitly expressed policies. Metadata and policies are themselves managed by appropriate services. The main point is that the components, the metadata and the policies are all decoupled from each other and dynamically updated. Self-organisation and self-adaptation at the system level is obtained by individual components behaviour being guided by the prescribed policies. This architecture has been established in a separate project.

Papers

Poster


Grants


Partners


G. Di Marzo Serugendo
Sep 2009.