Evolvable Production Systems: Environment for New Business Models

Abstract

The increasing threats and opportunities, on the global markets, challenge today the company at several levels. The actual Manufacturing Systems becomes dramatic for the survival and prosperity of the organization. Agility, Sustainability and high rate of Re-usability are the main objectives of an “Evolvable Production System”. Task-specific and process-oriented modules with embedded intelligence, together with distributed control based on agent technology are the cornerstones of an EPS. The realization and management of this kind of systems entail an ontological approach due to their implicit complexity. The reference architecture is the key to canalize the underlying holism of an EPS towards an effective instantiation, which exploits the “Emergent Behavior”, the key driver of the Evolvability of a system. The issues related with the application of this view, such as dynamic link between product and system design as well as the management of a module repository, underline the weakness of present business models. Therefore a model for the emplacement of a System that follows the “Evolvable Paradigm” predicament has been produced in order to enable further studies. One of the conclusions of the work is the need for a more suitable approach to business by the main actors involved in the realization of an EPS. Sharing information and standards about product design and modules realization becomes a compulsory strategic choice.

Current status and advancement of cyber-physical systems in manufacturing

“…5 illustrates the relationship between common skills and specific skills. The fundamental aspect here is the parameterisation of common processes, as defined by the evolvable systems approach [43]. In this context, agents and PLCs function as a highly adaptable cyber-physical system.…”

Integrated design environment for reusable modular assembly systems

“…This history can be traced via the European Research projects such as SCOPES (ESPRIT III, 1995), CISAL (De Lit et al, 2003), E-RACE (Lohse et al, 2004), EUPASS (2008) and IDEAS (Onori et al, 2012;IRAMP-EU, 2013;Pinto et al, 2015). These projects advanced the concepts of MAS but also highlighted the need for a change in the business approach for the design of MAS (Maffei and Onori, 2011). The openMOS project is yet another European initiative, which aims to deliver a common operating system that connects all the Plug-and-Produce devices in the system (openMOS Project, 2015).…”

Characterization of Costs and Strategies for Automation in Evolvable Production Systems

“…Some of the current approaches to design and develop production systems seem to fail in meeting such envisaged requirements. In particular, traditional investment-intensive manufacturing facilities such as Automatic Assembly Systems (AAS) are still conceived with a rigid, short-term oriented logic [3]. In detail, considering the two focal dimension of the issue:…”

“…In recent years, the active EPS research community has extensively studied different aspects of such domain which, in turn has spread in different directions through a large amount of heterogeneous contributions: research requirements [10], design support tools and models [11,12], business processes [5,13,14], diagnostic [15,16], system deployment and description [17,18], system configuration [19], self-learning mechanisms [20], self-organization theory [21] and management of complexity [22] among the others. Most of the research efforts that shaped the EPS paradigm at the early stage have been carried out within the large collaborative European project EUPASS [23] while the more recent developments have been attained within the following European project IDEAS [24,25].…”