Evolvable systems: an approach to self-X production

Abstract

Current major road mapping efforts, such as ManuFuture, FutMan and EUPASS, have all clearly underlined that true industrial sustainability will require far higher levels of systems' autonomy and adaptability. In accordance with these recommendations, the Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) has aimed at developing such technological solutions and support mechanisms. Since its inception in 2002 as a next generation of production systems, the concept is being further developed and tested to emerge as a production system paradigm. The essence of evolvability resides not only in the ability of system components to adapt to the changing conditions of operation, but also to assist in the evolution of these components in time such that processes may become self-X, x standing for one more desirable properties of a system subjected to a variable operation condition such as self-evolvable, self-reconfigurable, self-tuning, self-diagnosing, etc. Characteristically, Evolvable systems have distributed control, and are composed of intelligent modules integrated. To assist the development and life cycle issues, comprehensive methodological framework is being developed. A concerted effort is being exerted through European research projects in collaboration with European manufacturers, technology/equipment suppliers, and universities. After briefly stating the fundamental concepts of EPS, this paper presents current developments and applications.

Modeling and simulation of evolvable production systems using Simulink/SimEvents

“…3) Timing aspects, such as total assembly time, including computation, negotiation, resource allocation, process, communication times etc. 4) The analysis should be in accordance with the EPS methodology [2], with an efficient information transfer between various experts related to different views. 5) The analysis tools should be easily incorporated in the development process of EPS.…”

“…A few of the latest developments related to EPS include but are not limited to the concept of a reference architecture [2], an ontology to support evolvable assembly systems [13], utilization of JADE (Java Agent Development Environment) platform for coding and implementation of agents [14], a visualization tool for retrieval of the information exchanged between different agents [15] and a methodology for configuring skills of an EPS [16]. These developments were carried out under European projects like EUPASS [17] and IDEAS [4].…”

“…One of the approaches to deal with these challenges is the Evolvable Production System (EPS) [2], [3] incorporating adaptability, reconfiguration and intelligence at the shop-floor level. An EPS is based on the Plug & Produce principle having modular architecture with intelligent, agent-based, distributed control [4].…”

“…In addition an EPS offers adaptability at fine granularity at the shop floor level (i.e. at the level of sensors and actuators) along with its responsiveness towards emergent behaviors in a system [2].…”

“…The modularity allows dynamic and run-time modifications including addition/removal of system modules in comparison to existing systems which have limited configuration capability and handle a predefined set of products. The control architecture of an EPS has inspirations from several research domains [2], namely; Complexity Theory [5], Autonomic Computing [6], Artificial Intelligence [7] , Emergence [8], Multi-agent systems [9] and Self-organization.…”