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.

Agents enabling cyber-physical production systems

“…Aiming to address the emergent challenges of self-organization and responsiveness, besides the basic properties, i.e. autonomy, intelligence and cooperation, an agent is required to provide a set of self-X properties (X is a placeholder for "one or more desirable properties of a system subjected to a variable operation condition" [33]). The application of self-X properties in production automation has been intensively discussed over the last years [34,35].…”

Ecosystem-inspired enterprise modelling framework for collaborative and networked manufacturing systems

“…Therefore, the ultimate goal of designing new manufacturing systems is to create an autonomic heterogeneous system that can sustain and reconfigure itself [33,34]. Research assumptions, and their potential realisation, are based on three ideas.…”

Assembly Features Utilization to Support Production System Adaptation

“…An assembly activity is composed of assembly processes which collections of lower level assembling activities with a purpose of facilitating the assembling of an assembly or subassembly [15], and they are composed of tasks, operations and actions. The EAS is composed of several units; the most fundamental unit is the module unit, which is defined as "a self-composed entity with a given functionality and with well-defined interfaces, via which it interacts with other modules" [4]. In terms of collaborative design, our aim is to facilitate knowledge transfer between part, operation and modules by utilizing assembly features to define the operations and modules required for assembly.…”

“…EAS aims to cope with unpredictable and changing production requirements by building evolvable capabilities into the production system. As stated by Onori et al [4], [5], [6] evolvability is not only the ability of system components to adapt to changing requirements, but also a characteristic, which assists the processes in becoming more self-x, which can stand for self-evolvable, self-reconfigurable, selftuning, self-diagnosing and so on.…”